Page:Lenin - The Soviets at Work (1919).pdf/41

Rh the very same restoration threatens us today in a different form, through the environment of petty bourgeois dissoluteness and anarchism, in the form of ordinary, small, but numerous attacks and aggressions of this environment against proletarian discipline. This environment of petty bourgeois anarchy we must and we will conquer.

The Socialist character of the Soviet democracy—that is, of proletarian democracy in its concrete particular application—consists first in this: that the electorate comprises the toiling and exploited masses—that the bourgeoisie is excluded. Secondly in this: that all bureaucratic formalities and limitations of elections are done away with—that the masses themselves determine the order and the time of elections and with complete freedom of recall of elected officials. Thirdly, that the best possible mass organization of the vanguard of the toilers—of the industrial proletariat—is formed, enabling them to direct the exploited masses, to attract them to active participation in political life, to train them politically through their own experience, that in this way a beginning has been made for the first time actually to get the whole population to learn how to manage and to begin managing.

Such are the principal distinctive features of the democracy which is being tried in Russia, and which is a higher type of democracy, which breaks away from bourgeois distortion, and which is a transition to Socialist democracy and to conditions which will mean the beginning of the end of the state.

Of course, the chaotic petty bourgeois disorganization (which will inevitably manifest itself in one or another degree during every proletarian revolution, and which in our revolution, on account of the petty bourgeois character of the country, its backwardness, and the consequences of the reactionary war, manifests itself with special strength) cannot but leave its mark on the Soviets.

We must work unceasingly to develop the organization