Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/424

 directs the joint work of hundreds, thousands and tens of thousands of people. This necessity is obvious from the technical, economic and historical standpoints and has always been recognized by all those who had given any thought to Socialism as its pre-requisites. But how can we secure a strict unity of will? By subjecting the will of thousands to the will of one.

This subjection, if the participants in the common work are ideally conscious and disciplined, may resemble the gentle leadership of an orchestra conductor; but may take the acute form of a dictatorship,—if there is no ideal discipline and consciousness. But at any rate, complete submission to a single will is absolutely necessary for the success of the process of work which is organized on the type of large machine industry. This is doubly true of the railways. And just this transition from one political problem to another, which in appearance has no resemblance to the first, constitutes the peculiarity of present period. The Revolution has just broken the oldest, the strongest, and the heaviest chains to which the masses were compelled to submit. So it was yesterday. And today the same Revolution—and indeed in the interests of Socialism—demands the absolute submission of the masses to the single will of these who direct the tabor process. It is self-understood that such a transition cannot take place at once. It is self-understood that it can be realized only after great upheavals, crises, returns to the old; only through the greatest strain on the energy of the proletarian vanguard which is leading the people to the new order. This is ignored by those who vacillate and drop completely into the hysterics of the Novaya Zhizn, V period, Dielo Naroda and Nash Viek.

Take the psychology of the average, ordinary type of the toiling and exploited masses and compare this psychology with the objective, material conditions of their social life. Before the November revolution they had never seen the possessing exploiting classes sacrifice in their favor anything that was really of value to them. The proletarian had not seen that he would be given the often promised land and liberty, that he would be given peace, that they would sacrifice the interests of a "greater Russia" and of the secret treaties aiming at a "greater Russia," that they would sacrifice capital and profits. He saw this only after November 7, 1917,—when the proletarian took these things himself by force and when he had to defend them by force against the Kerenskys, Gotz, Gegetchkoris, Dutoffs, and Kornilovs. It is natural that for a cer-