Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/29



The revolutionary mass action of the workers of Petrograd, their strikes, demonstrations and riots, was the force the impact of which made Czarism totter on its throne and then dragged it to the ground in ruins.

It was this irresistible mass action that smashed through the barriers of authority and rent asunder the fetters of the ideology of submission. It was this elemental action that swept away the apathy of other groups of the masses and rallied them for the Revolution. It was this proletarian action that encouraged the soldiers to revolt and secured their adhesion to the revolutionary cause. And this great action had been preparing itself throughout the agonizing years of the war, of hunger, of misery and o£ oppression. Hatreds and rancors develop, the forces of revolt accumulate; but the mass of the people is apathetic, feeling itself helpless before the imposing enginery of authority, until action somewhere, somehow, breaks loose and throws the whole of society up into the air. The proletariat, united by the discipline of industry, rendered conscious of class by a common life and common oppression, aware of its control of the economic process, was the only class capable of developing the initial action out of which could arise the general mass action of revolution.

It is a fact of history, and a fact that must be emphasized, that the workers of Petrograd made the Revolution; it was their revolutionary blows that shattered Czarism. The liberal bourgeoisie and the propertied classes generally did not participate in the actual making of the Revolution; their contribution was the passive one of not opposing the workers when the forces of revolt flared up into action, and of being willing to use the conquests of the workers in their own class interests. Some months before the great revolt, Paul N. Milyukov, leader of the Constitutional Democrats, the party of the bourgeoisie, declared: "If victory can be secured only by means of a revolution, then we don't want any victory." And on February 23, 1917, Milyukov, in an open letter to the press, protested against the "false use" of his name by agitators who were trying to get workers to demonstrate before the Duma at its coming opening on March 3. At the same time, the commander of the Petrograd military district appealed to the workers' patriotism to refrain from demonstrations, and backed up his appeal by threats of force. M. Milyukov and the representative of the Czar were united as against the masses.

All through the month of February things were stirring. The Duma was to meet, and the people began to hope. Protopopoff, Minister of the Interior, talked of concessions to the Jews. The class of 1898, the boys of 19 and 20,