Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/199



The most peculiar feature, the distinguishing mark of our Revolution is the condition of dual authority it has established. This is a primary fact on which there must be clarity; without an understanding of this fact no progress is possible. The old "formulas" of Bolshevism, for instance, must be rounded out and corrected, for while they were true in general, their actual working out has been shown to be different. No one could have been aware, before the fact, of the condition of dual authority.

This dual power manifests itself through the existence of two different governments: the main, actual government, the government of the bourgeoisie, the Provisional Government, which holds in its hands all the machinery of power, and a supplementary, secondary, "controlling" government, the Councils of Workers and Soldiers, which does not have at its disposal any of the machinery of state power but which has the immediate and indubitable support of the majority of the nation, of the armed workers and soldiers.

The Revolution that overthrew Czarism and placed power in the hands of the bourgeoisie almost led to a revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry. And this second government, the government of the Councils, representing the proletariat and the peasantry, is a revolutionary dictatorship, that is, its authority rests directly on revolutionary usurpation exercised through the immediate pressure of the masses from below, not on laws promulgated by some central government power. The source of power is not in laws previously discussed and passed by parliament, but, as in the Paris Commune, in the direct pressure and action of the masses; the preservation of order is no longer the function of an army and police, but of the workers and peasants themselves, of the armed nation.

But this power, and this is another peculiar and a most important feature of the Russian Revolution,—enjoying the fulfull [sic] confi-