Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/275

 made an alliance with the Sixteenth of June men, with the object of curbing, disarming, and jailing the Socialist workers and soldiers. The treachery of the petit bourgeois democracy, its shameful capitulation to the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie, it is that which disturbed the alignment of power, and not for the first time in the history of the Revolution.

Under these circumstances the last ministry was created, which was designated "the government of Kerensky." The irresolute, powerless, shaky regime of the petit bourgeois democracy was transformed into a personal dictatorship.

Under the name of "a dual authority" there went on a struggle between irreconcilable class tendencies; the imperialistic republic and the workers' democracy. While the issues of this struggle remained unsolved, it paralyzed the Revolution and inevitably produced symptoms of "anarchy." Being led by politicians who are afraid of everything, the Soviet did not dare assume power. The representative of all the propertied cliques, the Cadet party, could not yet assume power. What was needed was a great conciliator, a mediator, an impartial referee.

Already in the middle of May, at a meeting of the Petrograd Soviet, Kerensky had been called "the mathematical point of Russian Bonapartism." This characterization shows, at the very start, that it is not Kerensky that matters, but rather his historical function. It might be somewhat superficial to declare that Kerensky is made of the same stuff as the first Bonaparte; to say the least, it has not been proved. Yet his popularity seems to be more than an accident. Kerensky seemed closer to the understanding of all the Pan-Russian philistines. A defender of political prisoners, a "social-revolutionist," who headed the laborites, a radical not connected with any Socialist school, Kerensky reflected most fully the first phase of the Revolution, its "national" vagueness, the engaging idealism of its hopes and its expectations. He talked about land and liberty, about order, about the peace of nations, about the defence of the fatherland, about the heroism of Liebknecht, about the fact that the Russian Revolution would astonish the world with its greatness of soul, all the while waving a red silk handkerchief. The half-awakened Philistine listened to these speeches with ecstasy: to him it seemed as if he were himself up on the platform talking. The army hailed Kerensky as a deliverer from Guchkov. The peasants heard that he was a laborite, a delegate of the muzhiks. The extreme moderation of his views, beneath his confused radicalism of phrase,