Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/228

 ernment. The revolutionary Social Democracy predicted that the new government would not differ essentially from the old, that it would not make any concessions to the Revolution and would again betray the hopes of the masses. And so it came to pass. After two months of a policy of weakness, of demands for confidence, of verbose exhortations, the government's position of beclouding the issues could no longer be concealed. It became clear that the masses had once more—and this time more cruelly than ever before—been deceived.

The impatience and the mistrust of the great body of workers and soldiers in Petrograd was increasing, not day by day, but hour by hour. These feelings, fed by the prolonged war, so hopeless for all participating in it, by economic disorganization, by an invisible setting up of a general cessation of the most important branches of production, found their immediate political expression in the slogan: "All power to the Soviets!" The retirement of the Cadets and the definite proof of the internal bankruptcy of the Provisional Government convinced the masses still more thoroughly that they were in the right as opposed to the official leaders of the Soviets. The vacillations of the Social-Revolutionists and the Mensheviki simply added oil to the flames. The demands, almost persecutions, addressed to the Petrograd garrison, requiring them to inaugurate an offensive, had a similar effect. An explosion became inevitable.

All parties, including the Bolsheviki, took every step to prevent the masses from making the demonstration of July 16; but the masses did demonstrate, and with weapons in their hands, moreover. All the agitators, all the district representatives declared on the evening of July i6 that the July 17 demonstration, since the question of power remained unsettled, was bound to take place, and that no measures could hold back the people. That is the only reason why the Bolsheviki Party, and with it our organization, decided not to stand aloof and wash its hands of the consequences, but to do everything in its power to change the July 17 affair into a peaceful mass demonstration. No other was the meaning of the July 17 appeal. It was, of course, clear, in view of the certain intervention of counter-revolutionary gangs, that bloody conflicts would arise. It would have been possible, it is true, to deprive the masses of any political guidance, to decapitate them politically, as it were, and to leave them by refusing to direct them, to their fate. But we, being the Workers' Party, neither could nor would follow Pilate's tactics: we decided to join in with the masses and to stick to them, in order to introduce into their elemental turmoil the