Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/427



The Socialist character of the Soviet democracy—that is, of proletarian democracy in its concrete particular application—consists, firstly, in this: that the electorate comprises the toiling and exploited masses,—that the bourgeoisie is excluded. Secondly, in this: that all bureaucratic formalities and limitations of elections are done away with,—that the masses themselves determine the order and the time of elections with complete freedom of recall. Thirdly, that the best possible mass organization of the vanguard of the toilers,—of the industrial proletariat,—is formed, enabling it to direct the exploited masses, to attract them to active participation in political life, to train them politically through their own experiences, that in this way a beginning is made for the first time to get actually the whole population to learn how to manage and to begin managing.

Such are the principle distinctive features of the democracy which is being tried in Russia, and which is a higher type of democracy, which breaks away from its bourgeois distortion, and which is a transition to Socialist democracy and to conditions which will mean the beginning of the end of the state.

Of course, the elemental petty bourgeois disorganization (which will inevitably manifest itself in one or another degree during every proletarian revolution, and which in our Revolution, on account of the petty bourgeois character of the country, its backwardness and the consequences of reactionary methods, manifests itself with special strength) cannot but leave its mark on the Soviets.

We must work unceasingly to develop the organization of the Soviets and the Soviet rule. There is a petty bourgeois tendency to turn the members of the Soviets into "parliamentarians" or, on the other hand, into bureaucrats. This should be combatted by attracting all members of the Soviets to practical participation in management. The departments of the Soviets are turning in many