Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/7

Rh system, the supremacy of the capitalist class economically and politically, and the definite establishment of the nation—ultimately conquered in Europe. But during the intervening period the Revolution was maligned by scholars and historians; it appeared as the crime of the ages, a senseless orgy of primitive passions; and English history for years after Waterloo accepted Napoleon as the "Corsican Ogre." After, however, the ideas of the Revolution had become ascendant, after the major nations of the world definitely emerged as bourgeois, parliamentary republics, as democrat-ic nations, the ascendancy of the bourgeois altered the prevailing conceptions of the Revolution. To-day, and for many years past, the French Revolution has been accepted without prejudice and distortion, as a really great event in the history of the world.

The Russian Revolution, in its determining proletarian phase, is an incomparably mightier event than any previous revolution; larger in scope and deeper in ultimate meaning than the French Revolution. Napoleon visualized Russia as a menace that might make all Europe Cossack; to-day, Capitalism visualizes the revolutionary Soviet Republic in Russia as the danger that may make Europe, and the world, all Socialist. Clearly, the antagonisms, national and international, generated by the proletarian revolution in Russia are necessarily more intense than the antagonisms of the French Revolution. That was a bourgeois revolution, a revolution that annihilated one form of class rule and tyranny in order to establish that of the capitalist class; it was not a fundamental social revolution, but overwhelmingly political in scope. This is a proletarian revolution, the start of the international Social Revolution against Capitalism, the purpose of which is not political reconstruction, but fundamental, intensive, economic and social reconstruction of the basis of the world. The French Revolution annihilated one form of property rights, the feudal, in order to introduce another form of property rights, the bourgeois; the proletarian revolution in Russia proposes the annihilation of bourgeois property rights, the annihilation of private property and its system of class oppression,—the end of the exploitation of man by man and class by class.

This is the Revolution, the initial action in the Social Revolution of the international proletariat against Capitalism and for Socialism. International Capitalism senses its great enemy in the proletarian revolution in Russia and the Soviet Republic: international Capitalism and Imperialism act accordingly. In this aspect, the parallel with the French Revolution is apparent: the Bolsheviki