Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/283

 Milyukov now hisses venomously about the "Order," about that Manifesto, and about the Zimmerwald Socialist Conference, saying that these things poisoned the army, it is at least in his case a deliberate lie. Milyukov knows very well that the chief "poison" is concealed not in any of the "orders" of the Soviet, which are at best moderate enough, but in the Revolution itself, which afforded to the sufferings of the masses an expression in the shape of protests, demands, and open contests of force.

The process of internal reconstruction of the army, and the political orientation of its soldier masses, burst forth in a fierce catastrophe at the front. The ultimate cause of this catastrophe is in the contradiction between the imperialistic policy, which made use of the Provisional Government as its tool, and the longing of the masses for an immediate and "just" peace. A new discipline and a genuine enthusiasm in the army can be evolved only out of the Revolution itself, out of a courageous solution of its internal problems and its definite struggle with external obstacles. The people and the army, if they felt and were convinced that the Revolution was their revolution, that the government was their government, that the latter would stop at nothing in the defense of their interests against the exploiters, that it was pursuing no external aims of oppression or conquest, that it was not curtsying to the "Allied" financiers, that it was openly offering the nations an immediate peace on democratic foundations, the toiling masses and their army would, under these conditions, be found to be inspired with an indissoluble unity, and if the German revolution would not come in time to aid us, the Russian army would fight against the Hohenzollerns with the same enthusiasm that the Russian workers showed in defending the gains of the popular movement against the onslaughts of the counter-revolution.

The imperialists feared this path as they feared death, and they were right. The picayune policy of the petit bourgeois did not believe in this method any more than the little shopkeeper believes in the possibility of the expropriation of the banks. Renouncing all "Utopias," that is, the policy of the further development of the Revolution, the Social-Revolutionists and Mensheviki continued the very same ruinous dual policy that was to bring about the catastrophe.

To the soldier it was said, and truthfully said, that this was an imperialistic war, on both sides, that the Russian Government was bound hand and foot by financial, diplomatic and military agreements, which were hostile to the interests of all the nations; and