Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/426

 We saw how the toiling masses constituted in themselves the fundamental condition of a successful solution: united effort against the exploiters, to overthrow them. Such stages as October, 1905, and March and November, 1917, are of universal historical significance.

We have successfully solved the second problem of the Revolution: to awaken and arouse the downtrodden social classes which were oppressed by the exploiters and which only after November 7, 1917, have obtained the freedom to overthrow the exploiters and to begin to take stock and to regulate their life in their own way. The "meeting-holding" of the most oppressed and downtrodden, of the least trained, toiling masses, their joining the Bolsheviki, their creating everywhere Soviet organization,—this is the second great stage of the Revolution.

We are now in the third stage. Our gains, our decrees, our laws, our plans must be secured by the solid forms of every day labor discipline. This is the most difficult, but also the most promising problem, for only its solution will give us Socialism. We must learn to combine the stormy democracy of the meetings, overflowing with fresh energy, breaking all restraint, the democracy of the toiling masses—with iron discipline during work, with absolute submission to the will of one person, the Soviet director, during work.

We have not learned this, but we will learn.

The restoration of bourgeois exploitation threatened us yesterday through the Kornilovs, Gotz, Dutoffs, Bogayevskys. We defeated them. This restoration, the very same restoration is threatening us today in a different form, through the environment of petty bourgeois dissoluteness and anarchism, in the form of ordinary, small, but numerous attacks and aggressions of this environment against proletarian discipline. This environment of petty bourgeois anarchy we must and will conquer.