Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/211



The war conditions are twisting and obscuring the action of the internal forces of the Revolution. But none the less the course of the Revolution will be determined by these same internal forces, namely, the classes.

The revolution which has been gathering strength from 1912 on, was, at first, broken off by the war, and later, owing to the heroic intervention of an infuriated army, was quickened into an unprecedented aggressiveness. The power of resistance on the part of the old regime had been, once for all undermined by the progress of the war. The political parties which might have taken up the function of mediators between the monarchy and the people suddenly found themselves hanging in the air, owing to powerful blows from below, and were obliged at the last moment to accomplish the dangerous leap to the secure shores of the Revolution. This imparted to the Revolution, for a time, the outward appearance of complete national harmony. For the first time in its entire history, bourgeois liberalism felt itself "bound up" with the masses—and it is this that must have given them the idea of utilizing the "universal" revolutionary spirit in the service of the war.

The conditions, the aims^ the participants of the war did not change. Guchkov and Milyukov, the most outspoken of the imperialists on the political staff of the old regime, were now the managers of the destinies of revolutionary Russia. Naturally, the war, the fundamental character of which remained the same as it had been under Czarism—against the same enemy, with the same allies, and the same international obligations—now had to be transformed into a "war for the Revolution." For the capitalist classes, this task was equivalent to a mobilization of the Revolution, and of the powers and passions it had stimulated, in the interests of Imperialism. The Milyukovs magnanimously consented to call the "red rag" a sacred emblem—if only the working masses would show