Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/189

 was not only a futile and petty bourgeois policy, it was insincere in that the Provisional Government secretly plotted war. The Mensheviki and Social-Revolutionists, the moderates in control of the Soviets, accepted this policy: they contributed to the delusion of a war for democracy, or a war to "defend the Revolution"—but which revolution?

During the period of coalition, the Council of Soldiers and Workers, in its dominant, moderate expression, was a representative of a vague democracy. "The unity of all democratic elements!"—this was the slogan of the Coalition Government, and of the Soviet moderates. But democracy under the conditions of Imperialism is an instrument of reaction, a factor in the promotion of Imperialism, a useful and necessary means of misleading the masses. The Government and Soviet moderates tried to revive the war spirit of the people by speaking of a "democratic war," a "war to defend the Revolution." But under the prevailing conditions every action toward war was counter-revolutionary: the "restoration of discipline" in the army was necessarily interpreted to mean the crushing of the Soldiers' Soviets; and, moreover, the war was waged in alliance with Anglo-French Imperialism, strengthening the bourgeoisie of Russia and its imperialistic interests. A war to defend the Revolution could be waged only after the bourgeoisie and the petite bourgeois "Socialists" were excluded from the government, only after the government had been converted into a "dictatorship of the proletariat"; only a revolutionary war, waged by a revolutionary proletarian government for revolutionary purposes could constitute a war "to defend the Revolution." The moderate Socialist majority in the Soviets, whose Socialism was a perversion of the class struggle and essentially an expression of the democracy of the nationalistic, liberal petite bourgeoisie, developed under the pressure of events into a conservative and counter-revolutionary force. The influence of the Soviet loaders was used to mislead the masses and to support the bourgeois policy of the Coalition Government. The only way out was to break the coalition by means of all power to the Soviets.

The problem of power was very much in the order of the day at the All-Russian Congress of Soviets which convened in the middle of June, Lenin and Trotzky leading the revolutionary opposition to the policy of coalition. This was Trotzky's formulation of the problem:

"I tell you that the country is approaching an outright catastrophe, because somehow we cannot understand that the whole thing lies in the creation of a homogeneous power. In two weeks the question will become more acute. The question is—power to whom and over whom? Is it power over the Revolutionary Democracy or the power of the Revolutionary Democracy? Do not forget that at the moment of demobilization, we will need a still more powerful government, and, therefore, I say that full power must be turned over to the Democracy.

"The policy of continual postponment and the detailed preparations for calling the Constituent Assembly is a false policy. It may destroy even the very realization of the Constituent Assembly. And these black ravens of the Fourth Imperial Duma are not at all so Innocent. Their