Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/267



No one can explain satisfactorily why there is to be a Conference at Moscow. More than that: all those who are to take part in the Conference declare, truthfully or otherwise, that they do not know what can be the purpose in inviting them to Moscow. At the same time, almost all express themselves in terms of suspicion and contempt when speaking of the Conference. But just the same they are all going. What can be the reason?

If we omit the proletariat, which occupies a position of its own, the participants in the Moscow Conference may be divided into three groups: the representatives of the capitalist classes, the petit bourgeois organization, and the government.

The propertied classes have their most complete representation in the Constitutional Democratic Party, the Cadets. Backing them are the great landholders, the organizations of trade-industrial capital, the financial cliques, the university faculties. Every one of these groups has its own interests and its own political prospects. Yet the common danger that threatens them all is from the masses of the workers, peasants and soldiers, and this danger drives the capitalist classes into one great counter-revolutionary union. Without suspending their monarchistic intrigues and conspiracies, the court, bureaucratic and general staff circles nevertheless consider it to be at present imperative that they should support the Cadets. And the bourgeois liberals with suspicious glances askance at the monarchistic clique, at present place a very high value on their support against the Revolution. In this way the Cadet party is becoming a sort of general representative for all varieties of greater and lesser property interests. AH the demands* of the propertied classes, all the extortions of the exploiters, are at present blended in the capitalistic cynicism and the imperialistic insolence of Milyukov. His policy is to lie in wait for all the false steps of the revolutionary regime, all its faults and mishaps, availing himself for the present of the "collaboration" of the Menshevik Socialists and