Page:Nikolai Bukharin - Programme of the World Revolution (1920).djvu/86

 unable to show any united resistance, with minds already tainted by the clergy and the school. They are instantly put up at barracks, and the training began. Intimidation and teaching of the most anti-democratic nations, a constant system of fear and punishment, corruption by rewards for crime (for instance, for the execution of strikers), all this makes idiots of the men, dummies who blindly obey their own mortal enemies.

It is evident that with the Revolution, the army entirely resting on the old Tzarist basis, the army driven to slaughter for the purpose of conquering Constantinople even by Kerensky, must inevitably have become disorganised. Do you ask why? Because the soldiers saw that they were being organised, trained and thrown into battle for the sake of the criminal cupidity of the bourgeoisie. They saw that for nearly three years they sat in the trenches, perished, hungered, suffered, and died and killed others all for the sake of somebody's money-bags. It is natural enough that when the revolution had displaced the old discipline and a new one had not yet had time to be formed, the collapse, ruin and death of the old army took place.

This disease was inevitable. The Menshevik and Socialist revolutionary fools accuse the Bolsheviks of this disaster: "see what you have done! Corrupted the army of the Tzar." The fail to see that the Revolution could not have been victorious if the army had remained loyal to the Tzar and to the generals in February and to the bourgeoisie in October. The soldiers' rising against the Tzar was already the result of the disorganisation of the Tzarist army. Every revolution destroys what is old and rotten: a certain period (a very difficult one to live through) must pass until the new life is formed, until the building of a new beautiful edifice is begun upon the ruins of the old pig-sty.

Let us give you another example from a different sphere. As the older workers know, in bygone times, when the peasants were only beginning to turn to factory work, the first thing that happened when they came to town was to become desperate "hooligans," "rowdies," "roughs." The word "factory hand" or "worker" were practically words of abuse; and indeed our workers were great hands at ruffianism, obscenity and swearing. Basing their arguments on this state of affairs, all reactionaries fearing any kind of innovation used to propagate a return to serfdom.

What they said was this: As town life depraves workers