Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/298

 very earliest stages of the revolution, was exposed to a crossfire between the powerful groups of imperialistic classes on the one hand, and the revoutionary-internationalist proletariat, on the other. In their struggle to exert an influence of their own over the workers, the petit bourgeois continued constantly harping on their "statesmanship," their "patriotism," and thus fell into a slavish dependence on the groups of counter-revolutionary capital. They simultaneously lost the possibiity of any kind of liquidation even of the old barbarism which enveloped those sections of the people who were still attached them. The struggle of the Social-Revolutionists and Mensheviki for influence over the proletariat was more and more assuming the form of a struggle by the proletarian party to obtain the leadership of the semi-proletarian masses of the villages and towns. Because they "voluntarily" handed over their power to the bourgeois cliques, the Social-Revolutionists and Mensheviki were obliged to hand over the revolutionary mission definitely to the party of the proletariat. This alone is sufficient to show that the attempt to decide fundamental questions of tactics by a mere reference to the "bourgeois" character of our Revolution can only succeed in confusing the minds of the backward workers and deceiving the peasants.

In the French Revolution of 1848, the proletariat is already making heroic efforts for independent action. But as yet it has neither a clear revolutionary theory nor an authoritative class organization. Its importance in production is infinitely lower than the present economic function of the Russian proletariat. In addition, behind 1848 there stood another great revolution, which had solved the agrarian question in its own way, and this found its expression in a pronounced isolation of the proletariat, particularly that of Paris, from the peasant masses. Our situation in this respect is immensley more favorable. Farm mortgages, obstructive obligations of all kinds, oppression, and the rapacious exploitation by the church, confront the Revolution as inescapable questions, demanding courageous and uncompromising measures. The "isolation" of our party from the Social-Revolutionists and Mensheviki, even an extreme isolation, even by the method of single chambers, would by no means be synonymous with an isolation of the proletariat from the oppressed peasant and city masses. On the contrary, a sharp opposition of the policy of the revolutionary proletariat to the faithless defection of the present leaders of the Soviets, can only bring about a salutary differentiation among the