Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/421

 experience are discovering that the disciplined and class conscious vanguard of the proletariat is their most reliable leader.

But "dictatorship" is a great word. And great words must not be used lightly. A dictatorship is an iron rule, with revolutionary daring, and swift and merciless in the suppression of the exploiters as well as of the hooligans. And our rule is too mild, quite frequently resembling jam rather than iron. We must not for a moment forget that the bourgeois and petty bourgeois environment is offering resistance to the Soviet rule in two ways: on the one hand, by external pressure—by the methods of the Savinkovs, Gotz, Gegetchkoris and Kornilovs, by conspiracies and insurrections, with their ugly "ideologic" reflection, by torrents of falsehood and calumny in the press of the Cadets, Right Social-Revolutionists and Mensheviki; and, on the other, this environment exerts internal pressure, taking advantage of every element of decay, of every weakness, to bribe, to increase the lack of discipline, dissolluteness, chaos. The nearer we get to the complete military suppression of the bourgeoisie, the more dangerous become for us the petty bourgeois anarchic inclinations. And these inclinations cannot be combatted only by propaganda and agitation, by the organization of emulation, by the selection of organizers; they must also be met with force.

To the extent to which the principal problem of the Soviet Republic changes from military suppression to administration, suppression and compulsion will, as a rule, be manifested in trials, and not in shooting on the spot. And in this respect the revolutionary masses have taken, since November 7, 1917, the right road, and have proven the vitality of the Revolution, in starting to organize their own—workmen's and peasants'—tribunals, before any decrees were issued dismissing the bourgeois-democratic judicial apparatus. But our revolutionary and popular tribunals are excessively and incredibly weak. It is apparent that the masses' view of courts,—inherited from the regime of the land-owners and the bourgeoisie,—as not their own, has not yet been completely destroyed. It is not sufficiently appreciated that the courts serve to atract [sic] all the poor to administration (for judicial activity is one of the functions of state administration); that the court is an organ of the rule of the proletariat and of the poorest peasantry; that the court is a means of training in discipline. There is a lack of appreciation of the simple and obvious fact that, if the chief misfortunes of Russia are famine and unemployment, these mis-