Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/201

 other way to lead them on. We are not Blanquists, we do not stand for a seizure of power by the minority. We are Marxists, and therefore advocates of the proletarian class struggle as against the petit bourgeois vaporings and illusions, against the chauvinism of the "national defense" attitude, against a dependence on the petty bourgeoisie.

Let us form a proletarian conununistic party, the elements for which have already been provided by the best advocates of Bolshevism; let us unite for the proletarian class war, and from among the proletarians, from among the poorest peasants, we shall draw to our cause an ever-increasing host. For life itself will destroy more and more of the petit bourgeois illusions of the "Social Democrats" Cheidse, Tseretelli, Steklof, etc., of the "Social-Revolutionists," and of the petty bourgeoisie in its more regular expressions. The petite bourgeoisie—the "Social Democrats," Social-Revolutionists, and others—stagger and hesitate, and thus muddle the work of enlightenment and liberation. That is the actual class relation between the forces that determine the outlines of our tasks.

The condition of dual authority is merely a transitional symptom in the development of the Revolution, which has gone farther than the usual bourgeois democratic revolution, but not as yet far enough to establish a complete dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry.

The class significance and class explanation of this transitional and unstable situation will be understood when we bear in mind the following:

Like every other revolution, our Revolution demanded the greatest heroism and self-sacrifice on the part of the masses in the struggle against Czarism, and set in motion an unusually large number of human beings. One of the chief symptoms, from the point of view of science and practical politics, of every real revolution is the unusually brusk and sudden increase in the number of just plain people who cease to remain indifferent and assume an active, individual, efficient role in political life, in the upbuilding of the state.

This is the case of Russia. Russia is in a state of ebullition. Millions of people who politically had been asleep for the past ten