Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/187

 words, compromise requires a surrender by one class or the other. Now neither the proletariat nor the bourgeoisie was willing to make the necessary compromise, which would have meant abdication; and the situation necessarily resolved itself into a dual struggle against the coalition,—a struggle from the right, that of the imperialistic bourgeoisie, and a struggle from the left, that of the revolutionary proletariat and its ally, the impoverished peasantry.

The principle of conciliation supposedly animating the Coalition Ministry expressed itself in practice in one acute ministerial crisis after another. The coalition was agreed upon on May 18; on June 1, I. A. Konovalov (Cadet), Minister of Trade and Industry, resigned his portfolio owing to a complete divergence of views with Minister of Labor Skobeleff (Menshevik-Socialist) concerning appropriate economic and financial measures, particularly the measures necessary to deal with the prevailing internal crisis. And this divergence was inevitable. Action to meet the internal crisis required measures limiting equally the power and the profits of the capitalist class, and the bourgeois representatives in the Ministry would never consent to these measures even when they assumed the comparatively moderate form of measures proposed by a Menshevik. In economic policy, as on war and peace, conciliation was a broken reed that could sustain nothing.

The Coalition Government was in an untenable position: it was an impossibility in operation in a revolutionary epoch. Either it honestly tried to represent both the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, the revolution and the reaction, in which case it might talk but could not act, because of the antagonisms of class interests; or else, under the pressure of events, it might act, but in the interest of one or the other class. It was no accident of history that the chief personality of this government was Kerensky (and Kerensky was its guiding spirit even before he became Premier)—an orator, a master of words, an adept in the psychology of promises. Only words, only fine phrases and glittering slogans, instruments for the deception of the masses, could be the expression of a two-class government in a revolutionary situation. And where the Coalition Government acted, it acted fatedly against the Revolution. Where revolutions do not act, they are submerged in a welter of words. If the revolutionary class shrinks before the task of assuming power and reorganizing society itself, the ruling class inevitably acts in the interest of reaction. Every day that passed in the making and acceptance of phrases as a substitute for action was a defeat for the Revolution. The policy of phrases makes for reaction. The slogans of the Revolution may be used and assimilated by the time-serving politicians of the bourgeoisie and the moderate Socialists: its action, never.

Under the Coalition Government, in practice the government of the ruling class, industry was demoralized by the bourgeoisie using its ownership of industry to starve the proletariat and paralyze the Revolution by locking out the workers and sabotaging production. Agriculture was demoralized because the government dared not carry out the revolutionary task of expropriating and distributing the lands, as this task antagonized the interests of the bourgeoisie represented in the government. The bourgeois representatives, aided and abetted by the bureaucratic machinery of government of the old regime retained in toto by the new, sabotaged any radi-