Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/279

 us say. But the Moscow Conference, in its personnel and in its objects, is a reproduction of this historic night in the light of day, so to speak. Tseretelli is fated once more to explain to all Russia that the passing of power into the hands of the revolutionary democracy would be the misfortune and ruin of the Revolution. After this solemn declaration of their own bankruptcy, the representatives of revolutionary democracy will be privileged to listen to a dreadful indictment directed against them, and previously drawn up by Rodzianko, Ryabushiniki, Milyukov, General Alekseieff, and the other "live wires" of the country. Our imperialistic clique, to whom the government will assign the place of honor at the Moscow Conference, will come out with the slogan: "all power should be given to us!" The Soviet leaders will come face to face with the rapacious appetites of the propertied classes, which threaten them with an uprising of those same workers and soldiers whom Tseretelji disarmed with the catchword "all power to the Soviets!" In his capacity as Chairman, Kerensky will merely be able to register the actual existence of "disagreement," and to call the attention of the "interested parties" to the fact that they cannot get along without an impartial referee. Quod erat demonstrandum.

"If I were in the Soviet Central Executive Committee," confessed the Menshevik Bogdanov, at a meeting of the Soviet Executive Committee, "I should not have called this meeting, for the government will not reach at this meeting the ends at which it is aiming: the strengthening and broadening of its foundation." It must really be admitted that these "Realpolitikers" actually do not know the things that are going on with their own active co-operation. After the disintegration of the coalition of July 16, the refusal of the Soviet to assume power precluded the possibility of the creation of a government on a broad foundation. The Kerensky Government, exercising no control, is in its very nature a government without a social foundation. It was consciously constructed between two possible foundations: the working masses and the imperialistic classes. In that lies its Bonapartism. The Moscow Conference has the purpose, once the privileged and democratic parties have been thrown aside, to perpetuate the personal dictatorship, which, by a policy of irresponsible adventurism, will undermine all the achievements of the Revolution.

For this purpose it is as necessary to have an opposition on the left as an opposition on the right. It is only important that they should approximately counterbalance each other and that the social