Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/218

 shops and among the soldiers at the front, the Socialists in the ministry, obedient to their masters, were risking the hazardous game of overthrowing the revolutionary proletarian advance-guard with one single blow, and thus preparing the "psychological moment" for the session of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets. To rally the peasant-petit-bourgeois democracy around the banner of bourgeois liberalism, that ally and captive of Anglo-French and American capital, politically to isolate and "discipline" the proletariat,—that is now the principal task in the realization of which the government bloc of Mensheviki and Social-Revolutionists is expending all its energies. An essential part of this policy is found in the shameless threats of bloody repressions and the provocations of open violence.

The death-struggle of the coalition ministry began on the day of its birth. Revolutionary Socialism must do everything in its power to prevent this death-struggle from terminating in the convulsion of civil war. The only way to do this is not by a policy of yielding and dodging, which merely whets the appetite of the fresh-baked statesmen, but rather a policy of aggressive action all along the line. We must not permit them to isolate themselves: we must isolate them. We must answer the wretched and contemptible actions of the Coalition government by making clear even to the most backward among the laboring masses the full meaning of this hostile alliance which masquerades publicly in the name of the Revolution. To the methods of the propertied classes and of their Menshevist-Social-Revolutionist appendage in dealing with the questions of food, of industry, of agriculture, of war, we must oppose the methods of the proletariat. Only in this way can liberalism be isolated and a leading influence be assured to the revolutionary proletariat over the urban and rural masses. Together with the inevitable downfall of the present government will come the downfall of the present leaders of the Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Delegates. To preserve the authority of the Soviet as a representative of the Revolution, and to secure for it a continuance of its functions as a directive power, is now within the power only of the present minority of the Soviet. This will become clearer every day. The epoch of Dual Impotence, with the government not able and the Soviet not daring, is inevitably culminating in a crisis of unheard-of severity. It is our part to husband our energies for this moment, so that the question of authority may be met with in all its proportions.