Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/399

 Russia by the war, and economically rehabilitate the country, without which there can be no serious improvement in our ability to offer resistance.

It is also obvious that we can give serious aid to the Socialist revolution in the West, which has been delayed on account of a number of causes, only in so far as we are successful in solving the problems of organization that confront us.

A fundamental condition for the successful solution of our most urgent problems of organization is the complete comprehension by the political leaders of the people, that is, by the members of the Russian Communist Party (the Bolsheviki), and then by all conscious representatives of the toiling masses, of the basic difference between the earlier bourgeois revolutions and our Socialist revolution, with respect to the problem under consideration.

In the bourgeois revolutions the main task of the toiling masses consisted in performing the negative, destructive work—the destruction of feudalism and monarchy. The positive, constructive work of organizing a new society was performed by the propertied bourgeois minority of the population. And they accomplished this task, in spite of the resistance of the workers and the poorest peasants, with comparative ease, not only because the resistance of the exploited masses was then, on account of their unorganized state and their ignorance, extremely weak, but also because the fundamental organizing force of the anarchic structure of capitalist society is provided by the natural, extensive and intensive development of the national and international market.

In every Socialist revolution, however, the main task of the proletariat, and of the poorest peasantry accepting its leadership,—and hence also in the Socialist revolution in Russia inaugurated by us on November 7, 1917—consists in the positive and constructive work of establishing an extremely complex and delicate net work of newly organized relationships covering the systematic production and distribution of products which are necessary for the existence of tens of millions of people. The successful realization of such a revolution depends on the original, historical and creative work of the majority of the population, and first of all, of the majority of the toilers. The victory of the Socialist revolution will not be assured, unless the proletariat and the poorest peasantry will manifest sufficient consciousness, idealism, self-sacrifice, and persistence. With the creation of a new—the Soviet—type of state, offering to the oppressed toiling masses the opportunity to partici-