Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/429

 to nourish seeds of the new order, growing under the fragments, on the soil that is yet full of rubbish.

It is not enough to be a revolutionist and an adherent of Socialism or, in general, a Communist. One must be able to find at any moment the particular link in the chain which must be grasped with all one strength in order to hold the whole chain and to assure the passage to the next links, and the order of the links; their form, their connections, their distinction, from one another in the historical chain of events is not as simple and obvious as in an ordinary chain which is made by a blacksmith.

The struggle with the bureaucratic distortion of the Soviet organizations is insured by the firm bond of the Soviets with the "people," in the sense of the exploited toilers, by the flexibility and elasticity of this bond. The bourgeois parliaments, even in the most democratic capitalist republics, are never looked upon by the poor as "their" institutions. But the Soviets are for the masses of the workers and peasants, "their own" and not alien institutions. The modern "Social-Democrats" of the Scheidemann type or, what is almost identical, of the Martov type, are just as averse to the Soviets, are just as much attracted to the well-behaving bourgeois parliament, or to the Constituent Assembly, as Turgeniev was attracted sixty years ago to a moderate monarchist and aristocratic constitution as he was averse to the peasant democracy of Dobrolubov and Chernyshevsky.

This proximity of the Soviets to the toiling "people" creates special forms of recall and other methods of control by the masses which should now be developed with special diligence. For instance, the councils of popular education as periodical conferences of the Soviet workers and their delegates, to discuss and to control the activity of the Soviet authorities of the particular region, deserve the fullest sympathy and support. Nothing could be more foolish than to turn the Soviets into something settled and self-sufficient. The more firmly we now have to advocate a merciless and firm rule and dictatorship of individuals for definite processes of work during certain periods of purely executive functions, the more diverse should be the forms and means of mass control in order to paralyze every possibility of distorting the Soviet rule, in order repeatedly and tirelessly to remove the wild grass of bureaucratism.

An unusually grave, difficult and dangerous international situation, the necessity to be cautious and to retreat, a period of