Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/45

 counter-revolutionary period during 1907–1914, fully revealed the nature of the Czarist Monarchy and brought it to the verge of ruin, exposing all its infamy and vileness, and the cynicism and corruption of the Czarist circles dominated by the infamous Rasputin ; it exposed all the bestiality of the Romanoff family—that band of assassins which bathed Russia in the blood of the Jews, the workers, the revolutionaries—those "first among peers," who owned millions of acres of land and would stoop to any brutality, to any crime, ready to ruin or crush any section of the population, however numerous, in order to preserve the "sacred property rights" of themselves and of their class.

Without the Revolution of 1905–1907, without the counter-revolution of 1907–1914, it would have been impossible to secure so clear a self-definition of all classes of the Russian people and of all the nationalities in Russia, or so clear an alignment of these classes in relation to each other and to the Czarism, as transpired during the eight days of the March, 1917, Revolution. This eight-day revolution, if we may express ourselves in terms of metaphors, was "performed" after numerous informal as well as dress rehearsals: the "actors" knew each other, their roles, their places on the scene, their entire setting, down to the smallest detail of every significant tendency and mode of action.

But, in order that the first great revolution of 1905, which Messrs. Guchkov and Milyukov and their satellites consider "a great mutiny," should after the lapse of a dozen years lead to the "glorious revolution" of 1917, so termed by the Guchkovs and Milyukovs because (for the present, at least) it has put power into their hands,—there was still needed a great, capable "stage manager," who would, on the one hand, be in a position to accelerate the course of history, on a grand scale, and, on the other, to release or produce the forces of universal crisis in every field: economic, political, national, international. In addition to an unusual acceleration of universal history, there were also needed particularly severe historical upheavals, so that during one of them the blood-stained chariot of Czarism might be overturned in a trice.

This all-powerful "stage manager," this mighty accelerator of events, appeared in the form of the present general imperialistic war. And it can no longer be doubted that this war is universal, for the United States and China haw been half-dragged in already, and to-morrow will be completely involved in the war. Nor can it any longer be doubted that the war is an imperialistic war on both sides; only the capitalists and their adherents, the social-patriotic "Social-