Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/284

 then they added: "But for the present go on fighting on the basis of the old treaties, hand in hand with the old allies." But the soldier, going under fire "for the present," meets with death. To go forth to make this supreme sacrifice is possible only for the soldier who has been carried away by the fire of collective enthusiasm; but this state is attainable only in a condition of complete faith in the righteousness of one's cause. The Revolution did away with the mode of thought of the unreasoning "sacred cannon-fodder." No Komilov, no Kaledin can turn back the course of History and restore the old hangman's discipline, even temporarily, without frightful repressions, tantamount to a prolonged period of bloody chaos. The army can only be preserved in a condition of war-time efficiency by giving it new aims, new methods, a new organization. It was necessary to make all the deductions from the Revolution. The ambiguous, irresolute regime which the Provisional Government, aided by the Social-Revolutionists and Mensheviki, had prepared for the army, bore within it the germs of certain catastrophe. The army had been armed with certain standards and given an opportunity for open criticism. At that moment new goals were set for the army, which manifestly would not bear the stress of revolutionary criticism, and in the name of these goals it was demanded that the army, exhausted, hungry, and unshod as it was, should put forth superhuman efforts. Can there be any doubt of the result, when we remember, in addition, that certain generals of the staff were consciously working for a Russian defeat?

But the Provisional Government intoxicated itself with bombast and empty words. Messieurs les ministres regarded the soldier masses, who were in a state of profound ferment, as the raw material out of which could be made all that was needed in the interests of the imperialists who had crippled our unhappy, devastated country. Kerensky besought them, he threatened, he went down on his knees, but he did not give the soldiers an answer to a single one of their serious problems. Having fooled himself with cheap oratory, he made sure in advance of the support of the Congress of Soviets, where there prevailed a supercilious petit bourgeois democracy, supercilious in spite of its "watchfulness," and ordered an offensive. This was, in the literal sense of the word, "Order No. 1" of the Russian counter-revolution.

On the 17th of June, we internationalists openly declared ourselves in the Congress of Soviets, on the subject of the offensive which was being gotten under way, and, together with a funda-