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 peasants, is what the workers and peasants can and should defend.

Should our workers and peasants suffer defeats, should the Constituent Assembly be really summoned, should the place of the Government of the Soviets be taken by an ordinary bourgeois republic after the manner of the French and American Republic, then the worker should not only not be under any obligation to defend it, but should make it the task of his life to overthrow such a republic. For it is his duty to defend the government of the workers and not the government of the bourgeoisie. With regard to the government of the bourgeoisie, he has but one obligation, and that is to overthrow it.

 

Since we have a dictatorship of workers and peasants whose aim is to crush the bourgeoisie completely and to put down any attempt of reviving the bourgeois government, it is plain that there can be no question of freedom, in the wide sense of the word, for the bourgeoisie, just as there can be no question of allowing the bourgeoisie the right of franchise, nor of transforming the Soviet Government into a republican bourgeois parliament.

The party of the Communists (bolsheviks) are overwhelmed on all sides by shouts of indignation and even threats: "You stop newspapers, you make arrests, you prohibit meetings, you suppress the freedom of speech and of press, you revive despotism, you are violators and murderers," and much more to the same effect. It is this question of "freedom" in the Soviet Republic that should be thoroughly discussed in detail.

First of all, let us take an example. When the revolution broke out in March of last year (1917), Tzarist ministers were arrested (Sturmer, Protoppopoff and others). Did anyone protest? No! And yet these arrests, just as any other arrests, were an infringement of personal freedom. Why was this in-