Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/254

 gled themselves more completely with the government by means of further agreements, and took other, even more fatal, steps to the complete undoing of the Revolution.

Revolution teaches all classes with a rapidity and thoroughness never possible in ordinary, peaceful times. The capitalists, being better organized and more experienced in the class struggle and in class policy, learned more quickly than the others. Seeing that the position of the government was insecure, they resorted to a method that has been practiced by the capitalists of other countries through all the decades since 1848, to hoodwink, disunite and weaken the workers. This method is the method of "coalition," that is, a ministry formed by combining bourgeois elements with renegades from Socialism.

In countries characterized more than others by the presence of liberty and democracy side by side with a revolutionary working class movement, namely, in England and France, capitalists have frequently resorted to "coalition" with great success. "Socialist" leaders who enter a bourgeois ministry inevitably become mere figure-heads, puppets, capitalist camouflage, tools for the deception of the workers. The "democratic and republican" capitalists of Russia put this same device into practice. The Social-Revolutionists and Mensheviki simultaneously permitted themselves to be fooled, and on May 19 the "coalition" ministry, including Chernov, Tseretelli & Co., became a fact.

The dupes of the Social-Revolutionary and Menshevist parties love to bask in the light of the ministerial haloes of their leaders. The capitalists rubbed their hands in glee when they found they had obtained accomplices against the people in the persons of the "Soviet leaders," who had promised they would support "an offensive at the front," that is, a renewal of the war of imperialistic aggression that had been suspended. The capitalists were aware of the puffed-up impotence of these leaders; they were aware that the promises made by the bourgeoisie (concerning the control and even organization of industry, the policy of peace, etc.) never would be kept.

And so it transpired. The second phase of the Revolution, from May 19 to June 18, fully justified the calculation of the capitalists as to the ease with which they could deceive the Social Revolutionists and Mensheviki.

As soon as Pyeshekhonov and Skobeleff begn fooling themselves and the people with fine phrases to the effect that they would take 100 per cent profits away from the capitalists, that the resis-