Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/8

VI are stigmatized as perpetrators of "mass murder," as enemies of civilization, as makers of anarchy, as brutish tyrants; the world, the bourgeois world of class tyranny and hypocrisy, is against revolutionary, proletarian Russia. The years to come will make the other parallel apparent: when Europe and the world emerge into Socialism, organized on the basis of the Soviet Republic, then the world will admit, what only the forward-looking Socialist now appreciates, that the proletarian revolution in Russia is mightier than the French Revolution, the greatest event in all history,—since it initiates the coming of universal Socialism.

Bourgeois class interests and their ideology of class defense distort and misrepresent issues and events in Russia, and prejudice judgement. But in a very real sense, another circumstance is responsible for the general misunderstanding of the Russian situation, and that is the failure to appreciate the fact that there have been two revolutions in Russia since March, 1917, and that these two revolutions are mutually exclusive and antagonistic.

The revolution in March overthrew Czarism, the feudal absolute monarchy, and introduced the rule of the capitalist class, the bourgeois parliamentary republic. That was definitely a bourgeois revolution,—bourgeois, not in the sense that the bourgeoisie made the revolution, since the task was accomplished by the revolutionary action of the workers and peasants, but in the sense that the revolution materialized, immediately, in a bourgeois republic. The "freedoms" of bourgeois democracy were introduced; the capitalist class was politically ascendant: and the government was a bourgeois government operating in the interests of Capitalism, imperialistic Capitalism. This first stage of the Revolution was political, not social; it annihilated the autocracy of the Czar, but industry was still capitalist, the social system still bourgeois.

But the revolutionary breach in the old order was deepened and broadened by the war and the prevailing economic crisis. The Revolution broke through the fetters that the bourgeois government tried to rivet upon its action. Against the bourgeois republic organized the forces of a new, oncoming revolution, the revolution of the proletariat and proletarian peasantry, the forces of a social revolution. The revolutionary class struggle formerly directed against Czarism now marshalled its hosts against Capitalism, determined upon a new revolution that would expropriate the bourgeoisie politically and economically. On all fundamental issues the