Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/197

 The government has not as yet announced the convocation of the Constituent Assembly. Neither does it interfere with the landholding machine, the solid foundation of feudal Czarism. The government is not considering investigating or regulating the financial organizations of a monopolistic character, large banks, syndicates, trusts, etc.

The most important and influential cabinet posts in the new government, the ministry of the interior and the ministry of war, that is, the direction of the army, police and bureaucracy and of the whole machinery for the oppression of the masses, have been given to well-known monarchists and supporters of the large landholding system.

The Cadets, the republicans of yesterday, republicans much against their inclination, have been offered positions of secondary importance, in no way affecting the ruling of the nation and the machinery of government. Kerensky, a representative of the Laborites and "also a Socialist," does very little besides lulling the people asleep with well-sounding phrases and causing them to relax their attention and their watchfulness.

For all these reasons, the new bourgeois government does not deserve the proletariat's confidence in the field of national politics and is not worthy of any confidence.

In the domain of foreign politics, which for obvious reasons is very much to the front, the new government stands for the continuation of an imperialistic war waged in concert with imperialistic nations, England, France, and others, a war waged to secure a share of the imperialistic booty and aiming at the strangling of smaller and weaker nations. The new government is subservient to the interests of Russian capitalists and of their powerful protectors and masters, the capitalists of England and France, the wealthiest in the world. It turns a deaf ear to the desires expressed by the Council of Workers' and Soldiers' Delegates, expressing a clear majority of the Russian people, and has neglected to take any genuine measures to end the international slaughter organized in the interests of Capitalism.

The new government has failed to publish the secret agreements of frankly predatory character, which, as everybody knows, have been concluded between Russia and the imperialistic and predatory capitalists of England and France. It has confirmed the agreements concluded by Czarism, a system which in the course of several centuries overpowered and oppressed more nationalities than any other system of tyranny and despotism, and which has