Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/51

 ers and Soldiers. Accomplish this, and the liberty of Russia will be invincible, the monarchy incapable o£ restoration, and the republic assured.

Any other course will mean a deception of the people. Promises are cheap; promises are worth nothing. It is on promises that all the bourgeois politicians in all ti» bourgeois countries have been "feeding'" the people and "fooling" the workers.

"Our revolution is a bourgeois revolution, therefore the workers should support the bourgeoisie,"—this is the cry of the worthless politicians in the camp of the "Socialist" compromiser and opportunist.

"Our revolution is a bourgeois revolution," say we Marxists, "therefore the Socialist workers should open the eyes of the people to the deceptive practices of the bourgeois politician, should teach the people not to believe in words, but to depend wholly on their own strength, on their own organization, on their own unity, and on their own military equipment,"

The government of the Cadets, of the Guchkovs and Milyukovs, cannot give peace because it is the government for war; it is the government that wishes and prepares for a continuation of the imperialistic slaughter, the government of conquest, since it has not even hinted at renouncing the Czarist policy of conquest in Armenia, Galicia, Turkey, of capturing Constantinople, of reconquering Poland, Courland, etc. This government is bound hand and foot to Anglo-French imperialistic capital. Russian capital is merely one of the sub-divisions of the "concern" known under the firm name of "England, France & Co.," with its annual turnover of hundreds of milliards of roubles.

This government cannot give bread, since it is a bourgeois government. At best it may give the people, as the government of Germany has already done, "a magnificently organized hunger." But the people will not put up with hunger. The people will learn, and they will learn it very soon, that the bread exists and can be had, but by no other means than refusing to bend the knee before the sacred rights of capital and of private ownership in land.

And this government cannot give liberty, since it is a government of junkers and capitalists, who are afraid of the people and people's oppressors.

But this is a transition period. We are emerging from the first period of the Revolution into the second, from the revolt against Czarism into the revolt against the bourgeoisie, against the imperialistic war. In this transition the "order of the day" is: "Workers,