Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/69

 First Revolution,' printed in this book as the first chapter, "The Bourgeois Revolution") published in Pravda, and in my "theses," I define the prevailing "moment in Russia" as a period of transition from the first stage of the Revolution to the second. Therefore, I considered the basic slogan, the "order of the day" at that time to be: "Workers, you have displayed marvels of proletarian heroism in the civil war against Czarism; you must now display marvels of proletarian organization in ,order to prepare your victory in the second stage of the Revolution."

What, then, does the first stage consist of?

In the passing of the state power to the bourgeoisie.

Before the March Revolution of 1917, the state power in Russia was in the hands of the old class—the nobility and the landholders, headed by Nicholas Romanoff.

After the March Revolution, the state power passed into the hands of a new class, of another class—the bourgeoisie.

The passing of the state power from one class to another is the first principle of a revolution, not only in a strictly scientific sense, but also in a practical political sense.

To that extent, the bourgeois, or the bourgeois democratic, revolution in Russia is completed.

But at this point we hear the shouts of objectors, who call themselves "old Bolsheviki": "Didn't we always maintain that a bourgeois democratic revolution is ended by a 'revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry'? Is the agrarian revolution, which is a phase of the bourgeois democratic revolution, completed? On the contrary, is it rather not a fact that it has not yet begun?"

My answer is: Bolshevist slogans and ideas in general have been confirmed by history; but concretely, things have developed somewhat differently than was expected, assumed a more original, peculiar and varied form.

To ignore, to forget this fact would mean to resemble those "old Bolsheviki," who more than once have played a sad role in the history of our party by repeating senseless "learned formulæ" instead of studying the peculiarities of the new, the living, reality of things.

"The revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry" in a certain form and, to a certain extent, is a reality of the Russian Revolution. But this "formula" foresees only a certain relation and co-operation of these classes and not the con-