Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/108



The significance of the Councils of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Delegates is generally misunderstood because the majority of the people do not realize their class character and meaning, the part they play in the Russian Revolution. The significance of the Councils is misunderstood for another reason, because they constitute an entirely new form of power, a new type of government.

To this day, the most perfect type of bourgeois government has been the parliamentary democratic republic: power vested in a parliament, with the usual machinery of government, the usual system and organs of administration,—a standing army, a police and a bureaucracy, practically unchangeable, privileged, and standing above the nation.

But the new revolutionary epoch, beginning with the end of the nineteenth century and determined objectively by Imperialism, has been pushing: to the fore a new type of democratic government which in certain respects ceases to be a government, or, to quote Engels' words, "does not seem to be, properly speaking, a government." This is a government on the model of the Paris Commune, replacing the army and the police by an armed citizenry. That was the essential feature of the Commune, which has been so much misrepresented and slandered by bourgeois writers, who pretend among other things that the Commune was trying to put Socialism into immediate practice.

This is the new type of government which the Russian Revolution began to organize between 1905 and 1917. The Republic of the Councils of Workers, Soldiers and Peasants, united in an All-Russian Council of Councils,—this is what is already coming into being in our midst, upon the initiative of millions of people. This is the government of a democracy which is taking the law into its own hands, which relies on itself alone and will not wait