Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/35

 ished peasantry wanted peace, the imperialistic bourgeoise and its "liberal" sycophants clamored for war. "Peace, land, and liberty" was the slogan of the Revolution; the Miyukov-Guchkov government granted the usual "bourgeois freedoms" and promised fuller liberty and land—in future; while it prepared to wage a new and more aggressive war. The personnel of the government had been changed, but its policy was still the policy of the regime of Czarism.

At this stage, the Russian Revolution is identical with and yet dissimilar to the earlier, bourgeois revolutions. It is identical in this, that the bourgeoisie does not make the revolution but steps in and tries to direct its course and policy, assuming control of the government; it is dissimilar in that the opposition of the proletariat to the bourgeoisie is not disorganized, inchoate, unaware of means and purposes: the masses do not disintegrate, becoming the helpless prey of the bourgeoisie, but are organized and disciplined through their own class organizations and class policy. In spite of immaturity, immediate hesitations, compromises and defeats, these organizations and this class policy impulsively drive the masses onward toward future action, providing the mechanism for the development of fuller class consciousness and class action. The significant and determining fact was the formation of two governments: the government of the bourgeoisie, the imperialistic Provisional Government, and the "government" of the revolutionary masses, the Soviet, or Council, of Workers' and Soldiers' Delegates. Immediate antagonisms developed between these two governments, antagonisms that acted as an educator of the masses and as a means of converting the general revolution into a revolution definitely and consciously of the proletariat and proletarian peasantry.

Councils were organized throughout the country, and in the army. These Councils were thoroughly democratic and representative institutions, consisting at first of Councils of Soldiers, of Workers, and Peasants; later the Bolsheviki organized separate Councils of the poorest peasants and of farm-workers to intensify the agrarian class struggle, and rescue the mass of the peasantry from the domination of the more prosperous and petit-bourgeois peasants, who naturally were conservative. The delegates to the Councils of Workers were elected directly by the workers in factories and plants, on the basis of equal male and female suffrage, each person over 20 having the right to vote. The representation at first was rather haphazard, but the principle was there and it gradually acquired more adequate expression. All delegates could be recalled immediately by their constituents. The functions of the Councils of Workers' Delegates varied with conditions and the consciousness of the masses. In certain sections they took over, even at this early stage, all the functions of government, and organized their own volunteer police of workers. Where employers shut down plants as a means of starving the workers, many of these local Councils expropriated the plants and granted the workers power to manage them directly. The Councils of Peasants' delegates, where dominated by the radicals, began immediately to seize the land and put in operation an agrarian revolution. These Soviets acted as the centre of the elemental bursting forth of the life of the people, of their political activity and purposes. Indeed, this new life of the people, of a people awakening after the sleep of ages, was positively feverish.

In spite of the attempts of the Provisioned Government to supress them,