Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/256

 "crisis of power" which was developing at that time, after the movement of July 16–17, up to the departure of the Cadets from the Cabinet, Minister Chernov was constantly occupied with the useful, interesting, profoundly working class task of "wheedling" his bourgeois colleagues, trying to persuade them to agree at least to abolish transactions of purchase and sale of land. This abolition was solemnly promised to the peasants at the All-Russian Congress (Soviet) of Peasants' Delegates at Petrograd. But the promise simply remained a promise. Chernov was unable to carry out the measure either in May or in June, and not until after the revolutionary wave, in the elemental uprising of July 16–17, simultaneously with the departure of the Cadets from the ministry, which provided the possibility of carrying out such measures. But even then this measure remained isolated and impotent to introduce any serious improvement in the peasants' struggle for land against the landholders.

At the same time at the front, the counter-revolutionary task of renewing the imperialistic predatory war, which Guchkov, hated by the people, had not succeeded in achieving, was accomplished brilliantly by the "revolutionary democrat" Kerensky, the newly-baked member of the Social-Revolutionary Party. Kerensky intoxicated himself with his own oratory, while the capitalists burned incense in his honor, worshiped him while using him as a puppet. And the reason was simple: Kerensky had been a true and faithful friend of the capitalists, persuading the "revolutionary troops" to consent to a renewal of the war, as a means of carrying out the treaties signed by Czar Nicholas II with the capitalists of England and France, a war having as its object the conquest, for the capitalists, of Constantinople and Lemberg, Erzerum and Trebizond.

Thus passed the second phase of the Russian Revolution, from the 19th of May to the 18th of June. The counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie was being strengthened and invigorated under the cover and with the active defense of the "Socialist" ministers, who had prepared an offensive both against the external enemy and the enemy within, the revolutionary workers.

On June 18 the party of the revolutionary workers, the Bolsheviki, prepared a demonstration in Petrograd in order to afford an organized expression to the irresistibly growing dissatisfaction and indignation of the masses. Fettered by their agreements with the bourgeoisie, entangled in the imperialistic policy of an offensive, the