Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/185



The great, the decisive problem of the Russian Revolution was the problem of state power, the problem of which class should control the state and what form the state should assume. Every phase and tendency of the Revolution is interwoven with this problem of state power, every crisis of the Revolution is a crisis of power. Within two weeks after the overthrow of Czarism and the organization of the Provisional Government and the Soviets of Workers, Soldiers and Peasants, the problem of state power appeared and swiftly became the determinant issue, of which all other issues were simply an expression.

The bourgeoisie, which at first desired a constitutional monarchy, reconciled itself under the pressure of events to a republic; its conception of state power was a bourgeois parliamentary republic retaining in its machinery all the essential features of the government of Czarism,—a capitalistic autocracy disguised in the mask of democratic forms. At the start, the Provisional Government was dominated by the ultra-reactionaries of the Guchkov and Milyukov type; but after the crisis of May 2–3, the government came under the control of bourgeois liberals, the Cadets and the moderate Socialists. The Cadets were avowedly imperialistic, a policy dictated by their class relations; while the moderate Socialists were compelled to acquiesce in an imperialistic policy because of their alliance with the bourgeoisie and their refusal to assume all power through the Soviets, by which means alone an independent, revolutionary policy could be formulated and put into practice.

On June 5, the Executive Committee of the Soviets issued an appeal to the Socialist and labor organizations of the world for "a determined and energetic fight against the universal slaughter," and "an agreement for the termination of the 'party truce' with imperialistic governments and classes, which makes nugatory the real struggle for peace." But this appeal was itself rendered nugatory by the Soviets' alliance with a bourgeois government, a policy fundamentally identical with the policy of the social-patriot Socialists of France, who sent their representatives into the bourgeois ministry of Viviani and Briand, of Capitalism and Imperialism.

The entry of Socialist representatives of the Soviets into the ministry was a flagrant violation of revolutionary Socialist policy and a contemptuous disregard of the prevailing situation. The only actual power in the nation was the power of the revolutionary masses, organized in the Soviets; the surrender of authority to the bourgeois government could not alter the actual relations of pow«r nor eliminate the antagonisms between the revolutionary masses and the bourgeoisie. Coalition meant a dodging of the problem of power, not its solution. In words, the Soviet leaders might relinquish all power to the government; in fact, the Soviets were compelled