Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/203

 to quote the apt words of my fellow-committeeman Teodorovitch at the All-Russian Convention of railroad workers in Petrograd. We must formulate criticisms and expose the mistakes of the petty bourgeois parties, the Social-Revolutionary and Social Democratic parties; we must train and bring together what will be the elements of a class conscious proletarian communistic party, we must rescue the proletariat from its mental asphyxiation by bourgeois ideas.

In appearance this is nothing more than propaganda work. In reality, this is the most practical form of revolutionary activity, for a revolution can not possibly get anywhere when it stops, gets drunk on words, treads everlastingly the same spot, handicapped as it is not by opposition from the outside or by bourgeois repression (Guchkov is only talking of taking stem measures against the soldiers), but simply by the unthinking confidence of the masses.

It is only by destroying this unthinking confidence (and we can only destroy it by education), it is by resorting to intellectual persuasion, by pointing out the teachings of life itself, that we will succeed in emancipating ourselves from this continuous spree of mere revolutionary words. Then only will we be able to move forward, then will we behold a real proletarian consciousness, mass consciousness, a courageous and resolute spirit of initiative in every local group; then the people will take the law in their own hands and bring forth, develop and fortify freedom, democracy and the principle of national ownership of land.

Bourgeois and feudal governments have developed a sort of international technique for keeping the people enslaved. They employ two methods. The first is violence. Nicholas I, the man with the club, and Nicholas II, the Bloody, showed to the Russian people how far one could go in the use of the hangman's noose. But there is another method employed most cleverly by the English and French bourgeoisie, who gained their experience through a series of great revolutions and revolutionary convulsions among the masses. It consists in fooling the people, in flattering them, in using big words, in making them innumerable promises, in doling out to them insignificant sops called reforms, in making them unimportant concessions for the sake of retaining the essential things.

And this is what gives to the present situation in Russia its peculiar interest: we are witnessing a vertiginous change from one method to the other, from violent oppression of the people to flattery and deceitful promises. … The cat listens, and continues its meal.