Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/214

 fidence, combined with a fear lest the revolutionary proletariat, in some unguarded gesture, might upset the whole business.

The cynically provocative foreign policy of Milyukov brought forth a crisis. Being aware of the full extent of the panic in the ranks of the petit bourgeois leaders when confronted with problems of power, the bourgeois party began availing itself, in this domain, of downright blackmail: by threatening a government strike, that is, to resign any participation in authority, they demanded that the Soviet furnish them with a number of decoy Socialists, whose function in the coalition ministry was to be the general strengthening of confidence in the government on the part of the masses, and, in this way, the cessation of "dual authority."

Before the pistol-point of ultimatum, the Menshevist patriots hastened to slough off their last vestiges of Marxist prejudice against participation in a bourgeois government, and brought on to the same path the Laborite "leaders" of the Soviet, who were not embarrassed by any supercargo of principle or prejudice. This was most manifest in the person of Chernov, who came back from the Zimmerwald and Kienthal Conferences where he had excommunicated Vandervelde, Guesde and Sembat out of Socialism—only to enter the ministry of Prince Lvov and Shingariev. To be sure, the Russian Menshevik patriots did point out that Russian ministerialism had nothing in common with French and Belgian ministerialism, being an outgrowth of very exceptional circumstances, as had been foreseen in the resolution against ministerialism of the Amsterdam Socialist Congress (1904). Yet they were merely repeating, in parrot fashion, the arguments of French and Belgian ministerialism, while they continued constantly invoking the "exceptional nature of the circumstances." Kerensky, under whose wordy theatricality there is, nevertheless, some traces of reality, very appropriately classed Russian ministerialism in the same category as that of western Europe, and stated in his Helsingfors speech, that thanks chiefly to him, Kerensky, the Russian Socialists had in two months travelled a distance that it had taken the west-European Socialists ten years to accomplish. Truly Marx was not wrong when he called revolution the locomotive of history!

The coalition government had been sentenced by History before it was established. If it had been formed immediately after the downfall of Czarism, as an expression of the "revolutionary unity of the nation," it might possibly have held in check, for a time, the struggle of the forces of the Revolution. But the first