Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/280

 conditions should maintain this equilibrium. But that is just the thing that is lacking.

The early Czarism had arisen out of a struggle between classes in the midst of a free society; but beneath all the warring factions and their Czar there was a stable substructure of laboring workers. The new Czarism seeks the support that is necessary to its existence in the passive inertia of the peasantry; the chief instrument of Bonapartism meanwhile being a well disciplined army. But in our country not one of these conditions has as yet been realized. Our society is permeated with open antagonisms, which have been carried to a point of the highest intensity. The struggle between the workers and the capitalists, the peasants and the landholders, the soldiers and the general staff, the suppressed nationalities and the central state power, do not give the latter any elements of stability, unless the government will firmly resolve to link its fortunes with one of the struggling forces. Up to the completion of the agrarian revolution, the attempts at a "classless" dictatorship must of necessity remain of ephemeral nature.

Milyukov, Rodzianko, Ryabushiniki want power to be finally lodged with them, that is, to be transformed into a counter-revolutionary dictatorship of the exploiters over the revolutionary workers, peasants and soldiers. Kerensky wants to frighten the democracy by means of counter-revolution, and to frighten the counter-revolution by means of democracy, and then to assure the dictatorship of personal power, out of which the masses will get nothing. But he is reckoning without his host. The revolutionary masses have not yet spoken their last word.