Page:Lev Borisovich Kamenev - The Dictatorship of the Proletariat (1920).pdf/4

 on the war were models of the application of dictatorial methods of ruling a country.

From the point of view of the government of a country, the imperialist war consisted in the assembling and placing under a single command of millions of men, in providing their equipment and transport, and compelling these many millions of men to carry out certain tasks. These tasks were foreign to these millions, and were accompanied for each of them separately, and for all together, with incredible sufferings, privations, and the risk of death. How did the governments of Europe, America and Asia accomplish the task? By what methods did they guarantee the assembling, equipment, transport and command of these millions? By what methods did they secure the adaptation of the whole administrative, economic and social life of the state to carry out the tasks set by the government? Was this achieved by means of democracy? By the means of parliamentarism? By means of the realisation of the sovereignty of the "people."?

The sovereignty of the people, democracy, the State, parliamentarism, even from the point of view of their hypocritical bourgeois defenders, cannot but mean the discussion and decision, if only of the most important questions, of the state and social life by the citizens themselves, "free" and "equal" in the eyes of the law.

However, at present, even the most unenlightened peasant, in the most backward of all countries drawn into the war, knows that the government of his country in 1914–1918 was, as a whole and in every detail, a clear, simple, elementary refutation of these regulations of bourgeois democracy. Democracy, parliaments, elections, freedom of the press, remained—in so far as they did remain—a mere screen; in reality all the countries drawn into the war—the whole world—were governed by the methods of a dictatorship, which utilised, when it happened to be convenient and profitable, elections, parliaments and the press.