Page:Nikolai Lenin - On the Road to Insurrection (1926).pdf/117



(Beginning of October, 1917.)

LL the work done by the Bolsheviks during a half-year of the revolution, and all their criticism of the Mensheviks and the S.R.'s who supported the policy of "conciliation" and transformed the soviets into talk-shops, demand from the Bolshevik Party the conscientious, sustained and strictly Marxian application of this slogan. It is regrettable to find that, at the head of the party, there are signs of hesitation, a kind of "fear" of the struggle for power, a tendency to replace this struggle by resolutions, protests and congresses.

All the experience of the revolutions of 1905 to 1917, as well as all the decisions and political declarations of the Bolshevik party for many years, demonstrate and affirm that the soviets of workers' and soldiers' deputies are only to be considered in reality as organs of insurrection, as agents of revolutionary power. That is the real function of the soviets. Otherwise they are nothing but a vain plaything, and a fatal cause of apathy, indifference and the deception of the masses, who are disgusted (and justly so) by the continual repetition of resolutions and protests.

At this moment, especially when the peasants' revolt, although repressed by Kerensky with the use of selected troops, is rapidly spreading all over the country; and when military measures applied in the country areas create a risk that the elections for the Constituent Assembly will be completely falsified; now that in Germany an insurrection has broken out in the fleet—the failure of the Bolsheviks to transform the soviets into organs of insurrection would be a betrayal of the peasants and of the international socialist revolution.

The seizure of power by the soviets depends on the success of the insurrection. For this reason the best forces of the party must be directed to the factories and military barracks to explain there