Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/281



The same struggle is going on, from the very first days of the Revolution, in the matter of war and peace: between the democracy of the workers and peasants, which was taking shape from below, and the imperialistic republic, which the propertied classes were trying to construct from above.

The illustrious generals hastened to "recognize" the republic—at least for the time being—firmly expecting that the republic would recognize and perhaps even extend their generalship, by eliminating the Archduke faineants. The "national" revolution meant, in their eyes, a court coup d'etat to depose Nicholas and his Alice, but to preserve in their entirety class discipline and the military hierarchy. A few days before, the telegraph had announced that the Greek "leader" Venizelos had declared Greece "a republic crowned by a king"! The Brussilevs, Guchkovs, Rodziankos, and Milyukovs, on the contrary, wished to continue Russia as a monarchy, minus the Czar. But evolution proceeded by other, deeper paths. The March uprising of the Petrograd regiments was not the fruit of a conspiracy: it resulted from a universal spirit of mutiny in the whole army and the masses of the people in general. And the uprising of the workers and soldiers was directed not only against a decaying and incompetent Czarism, unable to conduct a war which it had itself conjured up, but against the war itself. The profound break, which the Revolution called forth in the mind and in the conduct of the soldiers threatened not only the directly imperialistic aims of the war, but also the very instrument of those aims, the old army, which had been built upon the theory of orders from above, and unquestioning obedience in the ranks.

Now the generals, colonels, the politicians, the bourgeois scribblers rave and rage against Order No. 1 [issued by the first Provisional Government, establishing democracy in the army and allowing Soldiers' committees.] In their opinion, the order was not an outcome of an all-pervading ferment in the army, but, on the cont-