Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/271

 ageously it put down the opposition of its own bourgeoisie. Such was and such remains the sole and only actual prospect for the further development of the Revolution.

To the phantasts of the philistines, however, this outlook was "utopian." What did they want? They have never been able to say themselves. Tseretelli talked a lot about "revolutionary democracy," without understanding what it really is. It was not only the Social-Revolutionists who formed the habit of coasting on the billows of a democratic phraseology; the Mensheviki also cast aside their class criteria as soon as these criteria too clearly exposed the petit bourgeois character of their policy. The rule of "revolutionary democracy" clears up everything and justifies everything. And when the old Black Hundred stick their dirty fingers into the pockets of the Bolsheviki, they do it in the name of no less an authority than that of the "revolutionary democracy." But let us not anticipate.

Representing, as they did, the power of the bourgeoisie, or rather the neutralization of power by the means of coalition, the Social-Revolutionary and Menshevik democracy actually beheaded the Revolution. On the other hand, by defending the Soviets as their organs, the petit bourgeois democracy actually prevented the government from creating any administrative apparatus in the provinces. The government was not only powerless to do good, but rather weak in working evil. The Soviets, full of ambitious plans, were not able to carry out one of them. The capitalist republic, which had been planted down from above, and the workers' democracy which has been shaped from below, paralyzed each other. Wherever they clashed, therefore, innumerable quarrels arose. The minister and the commissaries suppressed the organ of revolutionary self-government, the commanders fumed in rage at the army committees, the Soviets were kept running to and fro between the masses and the government. Crisis followed upon crisis, ministers came and went. The discontent among the masses increased as the repressive measures of authority became more and more fruitless and systemless. From above, all life must have seemed a boiling torrent of "anarchy."

It was evident that the timid dualism of the rule of the petit bourgeois "democracy" was internally insolvent. And the more profound became problems of the Revolution, the more painfully manifest did this insolvency become. The whole state structure was standing on its head, or rather, on its two or three heads. An un-