Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/299

 peasant millions, remove the pauperized peasants from the treacherous influence of the powerful Social-Revolutionist muzhiks, and convert the Socialistic proletariat into a genuine leader of the popular, "plebeian" revolution.

And finally, a mere empty reference to the bourgeois character of the Russian Revolution tells us absolutely nothing about the international character of its milieu. And this is a prime factor. The great Jacobin revolution found opposed to it a backward, feudal, monarchistic Europe. The Jacobin regime fell and gave way to the Bonapartist regime, under the burden of the superhuman effort which it was obliged to put forth in order to maintain itself against the united forces of the middle ages. The Russian Revolution, on the contrary, has before it a Europe that has far outdistanced it, having reached the highest degree of capitalist development. The present slaughter shows that Europe has reached the point of capitalistic saturation, that it can no longer live and grow on the basis of the private ownership of the means of production. This chaos of blood and ruin is a savage insurrection of the mute and sullen powers of production, it is the mutiny of iron and steel against the dominion of profit, against wage slavery, against the miserable deadlock of our human relations. Capitalism, enveloped in the flames of a war of its own making, shouts from the mouths of its cannons to humanity: "Either conquer over me, or I will bury you in my ruins when I fall!"

All the evolution of the past, the thousands of years of human history, of class struggle, of cultural accummulations, are concentrated now in the sole problem of the proletarian revolution. There is no other answer and no other escape. And therein lies the tremendous strength of the Russian Revolution. It is not a "national," a bourgeois revolution. Anyone who conceives of it thus, is dwelling in the realm of the hallucinations of the i8th and 19th centuries. Our fatherland in time is the 20th century. The further lot of the Russian Revolution depends directly on the course and on the outcome of the war, that is, on the evolution of class contradictions in Europe, to which this imperialistic war is giving a catastrophic nature.

The Kerenskys and Kornilovs began too early using the language of competing autocrats. The Kaledins showed their teeth too soon. The renegade Tseretelli too early grasped the contemptuously outstreched finger of counter-revolution. As yet the Revolution has spoken only its first word. It still has tremendous