Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/73

 character with traces of an incomplete peasant revolution, to a Socialist revolution?

If I said: "without the Czar, but a workers' government,"—this danger would confront me.

But I did not say this. I said that there cannot in Russia be any other government (not considering the bourgeois) than the Soviets of Workmen's, Soldiers' and Peasants' Delegates. I said that the state power in Russia can be transferred now from Lvov and Guchkov only to these very same Soviets, and it is in just these bodies that the peasants, the soldiers and the petite bourgeoisie predominate, to express it in Marxian terms, involving not ordinary and professional but class characteristics.

I have absolutely assured myself in my "theses" from jumping over the peasantry, or the petite bourgeoisie; insured myself against every kind of adventure in the "usurpation of power" by a workers' government, against conspiratorial Blanquism, since I have specifically pointed out to the experience of the Paris Commune. And this experience, as is well known and as was pointed out in detail by Marx in 1871, and by Engels in 1891, entirely eliminated Blanquism, completely secured the direct, immediate, unconditional rule of the majority and the activity of the masses only to the extent of the conscious will of this majority.

Definitely and absolutely, I have centered my "theses" on the struggle for power … power within the Soviets of Workmen's, Soldiers' and Peasants' Delegates. In order not to permit even the shadow of a doubt in this regard, I have twice emphasiezdemphasized [sic] in the "theses" the necessity of patient, persistent educational work, of spreading understanding, "adapted to the practical needs of the masses."

Ignorant persons or renegade Marxists, such as Plekhanov and the like, can clamor about Anarchism, Blanquism, etc. But whoever wishes to think and learn can not fail to understand that Blanquism consists in the usurpation of power by a minority, whereas the Soviets of Workmen's, Soldiers' and Peasants' Delegates constitute the conscious, direct organization of the majority of the people. The task which is comprised in the struggle for influence within such an organization of the majority in the Soviets, can not be submerged in the swamp of Blanquism. And it can not be submerged in the swamp of Anarchism, as Anarchism is a negation of the necessity of government and governmental power during the period of transition from the rule of the bourgeoisie to the