Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/320

 through its slogan of a "democratic peace," promoted the war and reaction, and is the party of social-imperialistic State Capitalism as against the proletarian revolution. Democracy serves to promote Imperialism, and democracy may serve to prevent, temporarily, the proletarian revolution. The "radical" bourgeois republic of the Menshevist-Kerensky government was precisely of this character—the final stage of the republic of Capitalism. Pluming itself as revolutionary, it acted against the Revolution; it put pacifism in the service of Imperialism; it used Socialism to deceive the masses; it incorporated within itself the "revolutionary democracy" of moderate Socialism to provide Capitalism with a new lease of life. But this final stage of Capitalism multiplies the inherent contradictions of Capitalism, and is temporary. The "Socialism" of a bourgeois government is in the very nature of things mere camouflage, and being such it acts as a developer of class consciousness and revolutionary Socialism. The oncoming proletarian revolution in Russia, passing through a series of defeats which alternately weakened Capitalism and strengthened the Revolution, finally annihilated the bourgeois-"Socialist" republic. The proletarian revolution in Russia was not an isolated or arbitrary seizure of power, as was the Paris Commune; it was the outcome of an historical development characteristic of the proletarian revolution as a process of action and development.

Proclamation issued by Lenin, as Chairman of the Council of People's Commissaires, November 18, 1917.

Comrades: Workers, Soldiers, Peasants, All who Toil!

The workers' and peasants' Revolution has finally been victorious in Petrograd, scattering and capturing the last remnants of the small bands of Cossacks duped by Kerensky. In Moscow the Revolution was successful even before a few trainloads of our fighting forces arrived there from Petrograd. In Moscocw the Junkers and other Kornilovites have accepted the conditions of peace: the disarming of the Junkers, the dissolution of the "committees of safety." From the front and from the provinces there flows in, daily and hourly, news of the support by the overwhelming majority of the soldiers in the trenches and by the peasants in their villages of the new government and its decrees on peace and giving the land to the peasants. The success of the Revolution of workers and peasants is assured, for the majority of the people have already come out in its favor.