Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/292

 Central Executive Committee and the Petrograd Soviet. In view of the fact that the latter, taking its support from the advanced ranks of the working class, and die soldiers who made common cause with them, was advancing more and more resolutely to the position of revolutionary Socialism, the Central Executive Committee systematically undermined the authority and significance of the Petrograd Soviet. For whole months it was not convoked. As a matter of fact, they took away its organ, the Izvestya, in whose columns the thoughts and the life of the Petrograd proletariat now find no expression at all. When the infuriated bourgeois press slanders and dishonors the leaders of the Petrograd proletariat, Izvestya hears nothing and sees nothing. Under these circumstances, what can possibly be the significance of the slogan, "strengthen the Soviets"? One answer only can be given: To strengthen the Petrograd Soviet against the Central Executive Committee, which has been bureaucratized, and whose membership remains unaltered. We must gain for the Petrograd Soviet the complete independence of its organization, its protection, and its political functioning.

This is the most important question, and the settling of it is the first order of the day. The Petrograd Soviet must become the centre of a new revolutionary mobilization of the masses of the workers, soldiers and peasants,—in a new fighting for power. We must support with all our strength the initiative of the Conference of Factory Workers' Committees at the convocation of the All-Russian Congress of Workers' Delegates. In order that the proletariat may win over to its activity the impoverished masses of soldiers and peasants, its policy must be definitely and inexorably opposed to the tactics of the Central Executive Committee. From the above it must be clear how impotently reactionary and Utopian is the idea originating in Novaya Zhizn concerning a union between us and the Mensheviki. This condition may be attained only if the proletariat as a class will reorganize its central organization on a nation-wide scale. It is imposhible for us to predict all the twists and turns of the path of history. As a political party, we cannot be held responsible for the course of history. But we are all more responsible to our class; to render it capable of carrying out its mission in all the deviations of the historical journey—that is our fundamental political duty.

The ruling classes together with the Government of "Salvation" are doing everything in their power to force the political