Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/46

 ists" who support the war and their governments and abandon Socialism, can deny or suppress this fact. Both the German and the Anglo-French bourgeoisie are waging war for the conquest of foreign territory, for the suppression of small nations, for the financial supremacy of the world, for the division and re-distribution of colonies. It is a war to save the tottering capitalist regime, by deceiving he workers in the various countries and causing dissension among them.

The imperialistic war must, with manifest inevitability quicken the class struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, sharpen and intensify the struggle, and transform itself into a civil war between hostile classes. The transformation of the imperialistic war into a civil war has begun in Russia. This is the cause of the dual character of the Revolution, the initial phase of the first revolution arising out of the imperialistic war.

The first phase of this transformation was the March Revolution, the joint attack delivered against Czarism by two distinct forces: on the one hand, the whole bourgeois and landlord class of Russia, with all their less conscious satellites and all their conscious directors, in the persons of the Anglo-French ambassadors and capitalists; and, on the other, the Council of Workers' and Soldiers' Delegates, the revolutionary Soviets.

Three political groups, three fundamental political forces emerge clearly in the eight days of the "first phase" of the Revolution: 1—The Czarist Monarchy, the head of the feudal propertied class and of the old bureaucratic and military class. 2.—The Russia of the bourgeoisie and of the Constitutional Democratic, the Cadet, landholders, with the petit bourgeoisie, the middle class, floating in their wake. 3.—The Council of Workers' Delegates, its supporters being among the proletariat and the whole mass of the impoverished population.

But before going into further detail in this matter, I must come back to a factor of first importance, namely, the universal imperialistic war.

The belligerent powers, the "masters" of capitalist society and the slave-drivers of capitalistic oppression, have been shackled to each other by the war with chains of iron. One great bloody, congealed mass—that is the proper designation of the historic period through which we are now passing.

Those Socialists who deserted to the bourgeoisie at the begining of the war and who supported the imperialistic war, all the Davids and Scheidemanns in Germany, the Plekhanovs, Gvozdyovs,