Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/5



History is the history of class struggles. Revolution is the culmination of the class struggle; and history, accordingly, is equally a history of revolutions, of cataclysmic epochs when the antagonisms of the class struggle flare up into revolutionary and decisive action. In these great crises of universal history, the ordinary aspects of the class struggle assume a violent, catastrophic expression, developing into war, civil war, and into the searing, magnificent upheavals of the Revolution.

Every revolution has, during its time, been characterized as the end of all things, as a reversion to savagery, as the rapacious terrorism of men become again primordial brutes; and after each revolution the "excesses" previously stigmatized assume their right proportions, and the revolution is visioned as a fundamental, dynamic expression of the onward and upward development of the world.

The French Revolution is a great exemplar of the revolutions in history. The antagonisms of class against class implacably assumed a revolutionary character, and the Revolution aroused new and more violent antagonisms. As these new antagonisms became more acute, the course of the Revolution became more violent and ruthless, until its whole aspect appeared superficially as one bloody insanity of assassination and ruthless terrorism. The culmination of this process was The Terror, which the world at that time—that is to say, the world of aristocracy and privilege—characterized as the great infamy of the ages; and yet today, the historian declares that The Terror, much maligned and even more misunderstood, saved the Revolution. As the monarchy was overthrown and a mortal blow delivered at the feudal relations of society, the bourgeois revolution was on the verge of being accomplished definitely; but the consequent antagonisms aroused the fears of the bourgeoisie, and they hesitated, paltered, temporized. Marat and