Page:Otto Wilhelm Kuusinen - The Finnish Revolution (1919).pdf/4

 the beginning). The Russian Mensheviki also came forward tempters. The Finnish Coalition Government was the offspring of this immoral union. At the time of its formation in March about hall the Party representatives were opposed to it, and it was joined only by the Eight Socialists. Nevertheless, the resistance of the others was of so passive a nature, that it did not hinder for a single moment our collaboration with those Socialists who were hobnobbing with Finnish and Russian landowners. And it was very characteristic that in our Party meeting, held in June—during which we, in passing, gave our adhesion to the Zimmerwald International—not a single voice wns raised to demand separation from the Government Socialists.

What above all led us astray was the vague phantom of Parliamentary Democracy. If we had not had a Diet composed of a single Chamber, Proportional Representation and a relatively wide suffrage, and if the elections of the summer of 1916 our Party had not obtained a majority in the Diet, it might perhaps have been easier to be on our guard against the spring temptation. But at this moment the path of Parliamentary Democracy seemed cleared to an extraordinary extent, and wide vistas opened themselves out before our working-class movement. Our bourgeoisie had no army, nor even a police force they could count upon; and, moreover, could not form one by any lawful means, seeing that they would have needed the authorisation of the Social-Democrats of the Diet. Therefore there seemed every reason to keep to the beaten track of Parliamentary legality, in which, so it appeared, Social Democracy could wrest one victory after another from the middle class.

For Parliamentary Democracy to burst into full bloom it was now only necessary to get rid of the feeble authority of the Russian Provisional Government; to which the Finnish bourgeoisie clung like a drowning man to a straw. The Social-Democrats wished to brush aside, or at least to curtail, its legal right to interfere, so that it could not trouble the "internal affairs" of the country; in other words to protect the interests of the bourgeoisie. In this way our patriotism and our struggle for the independence of Finland seemed to spring from the very highest motives; it was a direct fight for democratic liberty, an organic part of the proletarian class-war.