Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/237

 this time the government power in Russia has been, in fact, and still is, in the hands of the bourgeoisie, which is obliged only to make private concessions (and taking them back the very next day), to issue promise after promise, to fool the people with the semblance of an "honest coalition," etc. In words, the government is popular, democratic, revolutionary; in deeds it is against the people, anti-democratic, counter-revolutionary, bourgeois. This is the contradiction prevailing in the government, and which is the source of the complete instability and vacillation of power, the source of the "ministerial leap-frog game" which Messrs. the Social-Revolutionists and Mensheviki played, with, for the people, such an unfortunate zeal.

Either the dissolution of the Soviets and their inglorious death, or all power to the Soviets,—that is what I said before the All-Russian Congress of Soviets early in June and the history of July and August unqualifiedly confirm the accuracy of my contention.

"Power to the Soviets" alone can make power stable, permanent, because based consciously on the majority of the people, in spite of how the lackeys of the bourgeoisie, Potresof, Plekhanov, etc., may lie and declaim that an actual handing over of power to an insignificant minority of the people, the bourgeoisie, the exploiters, is really a "broadening of the basis" of power. Only the Soviet power can be a stable power, it alone could not be overthrown even in the most stormy period of our stormy revolution, only this power could assure a constant and broad development of the Revolution and the peaceful party struggles within the Soviets. Until all power is in the Soviet, indecision, instability and hesitation are inevitaible, never-ceasing "crises of power," the inescapable comedy of the "ministerial leap-frog game," explosions from the right and the left, etc.

But the slogan, "Power to the Soviets" is, very often, if not in the most cases, absolutely misunderstood in the sense of "a ministry of the parties of the Soviet majority." This profoundly erroneous view requires consideration in detail.

A "ministry of the parties of the Soviet majority" means simply a change in the personnel of the ministry, with the retention and inviolability of the old apparatus of government power, an apparatus thoroughly bureaucratic and unable to carry out serious reforms which are of importance even in the programs of the Social-Revolutionists and Mensheviki.

"Power to the Soviets" means a radical and complete change in the old government apparatus, a bureaucratic apparatus choking the expression of democracy. This apparatus must be abolished