Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/290

 their subordination to the idea of a coalition with the enemies of the Revolution.

The Russian Revolution is a direct product of the war. The war created for it the necessary form of a nation-wide organization, the army. The greater part of the population, the peasantry, at the moment of the revolution, had been forced into a condition of organization. The Soviets of Soldiers' Delegates called upon the army to send its political representatives, whereupon the peasant masses automatically sent in to the Soviets the semi-liberal intellectuals, who translated the indefiniteness of their hopes and aspirations into the language of the most contemptible quibbling and hair-splitting opportunism. The petit bourgeois intelligentsia, which is in every way dependent on the greater bourgeoisie, obtained the leadership over the peasantry. The Soviets of soldier-peasant representatives obtained a distinct majority over the representatives of the workers. The Petrograd proletarian advance-guard was declared to be an ignorant mass. The flower of the Revolution was revealed in the persons of the March Social-Revolutionists and Mensheviki of the "provincial" intellectuals, leaning on the peasants. Over this foundation there rose, through the agency of double and triple elections, the Central Executive Committee. The Petrograd Soviet, which, in the first period, discharged nation-wide functions, stood from the outset under the immediate influence of the revolutionary masses. The Central Committee, on the contrary, dwelt in the clouds of the revolutionary bureaucratic heights, cut off from the Petrograd workers and soldiers, and hostile to them.

It is sufficient to recall that the Central Committee considered it necessary to summon troops from the front for putting down the Petrograd demonstrations, which at the moment of the arrival of the troops, had actually been already disposed of by the demonstrating persons themselves. The philistine leaders committed political hara-kari when they failed to see anything but chaos, anarchy, and riot in the tendency—which was a natural outcome of the whole lay of the land—to equip the Revolution with the apparatus of authority. When they disarmed the Petrograd workers, and soldiers, the Tseretellis, Dans and Chernovs disarmed the advance-guard of the Revolution and inflicted irreparable injury on the influence of their own Executive Committee.

At present, face to face with the encroachments of the counter-revolution, these politicians talk of re-establishing the authority and