Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/213

 It was only because the Revolution broke out in the course of a war that the petit bourgeois elements of city and country at once automatically took on the appearance of an organized force, and began to exert, upon the personnel of the Council of Workers' and Soldiers' Delegates, an influence which would have been far beyond the powers of these scattered and backward classes in any but war times. The Menshevist-populist intelligentsia found in this great number of backwoods, provincial, for the most part as yet hardly awakened persons, a support that was at first entirely natural. By leading the petty bourgeois classy on to the path of an agreement with capitalist liberalism, which had again beautifully demonstrated its inability to guide the masses of the people independently, the Menshevist-populist intelligentsia, through the pressure of the masses, acquired a certain position even among the .proletarian sections, which had been momentarily relegated to a secondary position by the numerical impressiveness of the army.

It might at first seem that all class contradictions had been destroyed, that all social fixtures had been patched up with fragments of a populist-Menshevist ideology, and that, thanks to the "constructive labors" of Kerensky, Cheidse and Dan, a national Burgfrieden truce between the classes had been realized. Therefore, the unparalleled surprise and wonder when an independent proletarian policy again asserted itself, and therefore the savage, in truth, disgusting wail against the revolutionary Socialists, the destroyers of the universal harmony.

The petit bourgeois intellectuals, after they had been raised by the Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Delegates to heights for which they were entirely unprepared, were frightened more by the idea of responsibility than by anything else, and therefore respectfully handed over their power to the capitalist-feudal government which had issued forth from the womb of the Duma of June 3. The organic terror of the petit bourgeois in the presence of the sanctity of state power, which was transparent in the case of the populists (Laborites), was veiled, in the case of the Menshevik-patriots, by doctrinaire notions as to the inadmissibility of having Socialists assume the burden of power in a bourgeois revolution.

Thus there came about the "dual authority," which might with much more truth be termed a Dual Impotence. The capitalistic bourgeoisie assumed authority in the name of order and of a war for victory; yet, without the Soviets, it could not rule; the latter's relation to the government was that of an awed half-con-