Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/11

Rh producing a large mass of typical and potentially revolutionary proletarians. The Commune tried to secure the support of the peasants, and failed; the proletarian revolution in Russia succeeded, at least temporarily. The Parisian proletariat, again, did not act in conjunction with the rest of France, nor did it operate in an epoch of general revolutionary crisis; the conditions of Imperialism develop a revolutionary epoch; and Soviet Russia will act, immediately or ultimately, as the signal for the international proletarian revolution. The Commune was the final, magnificent expression of the first revolutionary period of the proletarian movmentmovement [sic]; and while it signalized the end of an epoch, it simultaneously projected the determining phase of the oncoming Revolution,—the dictatorship of the proletariat. The proletarian revolution in Russia, while it acts in accord with this phase of the Paris Commune, projects a new epoch in the proletarian movement,—the definite revolutionary epoch, the initiation of the final struggle and the decisive victory.

The entry of Russia into the war in August, 1914, decreed by the government of the Czar, was signal for a great outburst of patriotic enthusiasm among the bourgeoisie, which allied itself with Czarism all along the line. Instead of using the war in the struggle against the autocratic regime, the bourgeoisie used it to promote its imperialistic interests. The Russian bourgeoisie was no longer revolutionary: it had become imperialistic; and this circumstance was a determining issue in the course of the Revolution.

The Revolution of 1905 supplemented the earlier abolition of serfdom in creating the partial conditions for the development of capitalistic industry. The bourgeoisie acquired new powers and influence, and a new ideology. Industry developed in great proportions, absorbed from without and reproducing all the features of large scale, concentrated industry. The industrial technology, not being developed slowly from within but acquired full-grown from without, did not reproduce normally all stages of the historical development of Capitalism. One consequence of this was that a large industrial middle class never developed in Russia, that class of industrial petty bourgeois which historically is the carrier of democracy and revolution. The Russian bourgeoisie was the bourgeoisie of Big Capital, of trusts and financial capital, in short, of modern Imperialism; while the "middle class" was dominantly a socially anemic class of intellectuals and professionals. (During the Revolution, the historic role of the middle class was usurped by