Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/328

 ism was actually organized, and only the solidity of the Soviets, the support of the revolutionary masses, rendered the terrorist campaign unsuccessful.

Moderate Socialism has much to atone for. It is the arch-enemy of the proletariat and of Socialism. In all nations it is the curse of the revolutionary movement. Moderate Socialism in Russia might have been forgiven its attitude prior to November 7; its acts thereafter will be forever an indelible brand of shame. The international proletariat will learn from the history of the war, from the history of the Russian Revolution, that the proletarian revolution must necessarily wage a merciless, uncompromising struggle against moderate Socialism, which in its tendency is counter-revolutionary.

The Soviet government used drastic measures against the counter-revolution. Its policy was unwavering and stern; the hesitancy of the coalition regime was a thing of the past. The Provisional Government possessed no solidity because there was no solid class behind it, simply a fictitious unity of parties; it could not, under the conditions, determine upon and adhere to an uncompromising policy. But the Soviet Government was reared upon the solid basis of the revolutionary proletariat; it could, and did, adopt a consistent, courageous and uncompromising; policy. The counter-revolutionary revolts were crushed ruthlessly, not simply by armed force, but by intensifying class antagonism and thereby splitting the opposition; as among the Cossacks, for example, where the solid support of Kaledine was divided by means of Cossacks' Soviets, organizing the propertiless Cossacks against those of property. Against the intelligentsia coercive measures were adopted, the only way to convince them of the futility of their course. The bourgeoisie was attacked by means of the expropriation of large enterprises and by a rigid workers' control of industry, the drastic regulation of the economic activity of the country. Perhaps the most effective measure against the opposition in general was the exclusion of the bourgeoisie from participation in the government,—which is another necessary feature of the dictatorship of the proletariat. And underlying all these measures was the Soviets' merciless use of mass terror against the counter-revolution.

The armed struggle against the counter-revolution raged throughout Russia, and spread into Finland and the Ukraine, where the struggle between the revolutionary workers and peasants and the bourgeoisie assumed a particularly violent form. The revolutionists in Finland and the Ukraine were assisted by the Bolsheviki