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 imperialistic bourgeoisie compromised with and accepted autocracy as an instrument for promoting its brutal class interests. The requirements of Imperialism are incompatible with bourgeois democracy, with the paltry democracy of the bourgeoisie in its earlier "liberal" era. What other meaning is there in the international reactionary trend away from democracy and toward autocracy?

Distrust of the bourgeoisie land of the bourgeois liberals runs as a red thread through the policy of the Bolsheviki: the Revolution must depend upon the proletariat and peasantry alone. The overthrow of Czarism was a bourgeois revolution, in the sense of overthrowing a feudal regime and introducing the democratic republic; but it was a bourgeois revolution made without the bourgeoisie and against the bourgeoisie, made, organized and directed by the proletariat.

But the problem of whether or not the Russian Revolution was a bourgeois revolution was a practical problem, and not, as misinterpreted by the Socialist moderates, an abstract one in historical theory. It is indisputable that an agrarian revolution was in "the order of the day" in Russia, and yet the bourgeoisie did all in its power to prevent an agrarian revolution. This was simply one problem of the Revolution which determined the Revolution in a merciless struggle against the bourgeoisie, not as a matter of theory but as a matter of practice. It was through the force of these practical problems, land, peace, the organization of a democratic state, that the Russian Revolution was converted definitely and consciously into a proletarian revolution. While the pedants piled theory upon history and history upon theory to prove the impossibility of a proletarian revolution, life itself and the stress of its struggles proved the pedants conclusively wrong.

Out of these practical requirements of the Revolution arose the uncompromising, unifying slogan of the Bolsheviki—"All Power to the Soviets!" And this slogan did not arise at the moment when the Bolsheviki were the majority in the Soviets, but from the first day of the Revolution, when they were an apparently hopeless minority. This insistence of the Bolsheviki upon power to an institution in which they were a minority should dispose of the slanderous charge that their's was a "rule or ruin" policy. The slogan, "All Power to the Soviets." was an expression equally of class policy and of the facts of the Revolution, in which the Soviets constituted the only actual, durable and revolutionary power. The Revolution, operating exclusively by means of the Soviets, would proceed logically on its course of reconstruction, unhesitatingly and uncompromisingly; for the Soviets, representing exclusively workers and peasants, would be compelled by the force of circumstances to introduce revolutionary measures, as a necessity of practice and not of theory. Separate the Soviets, and consequently the workers and peasants, from an alliance with and dependence upon the bourgeoisie, emphasize the proletarian class struggle and class policy, and the Revolution was an assured success.

"All Power to the Soviets" would constitute a revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat; but the dictatorship would equally have to represent the peasantry, otherwise init [sic] could not prevail. The peasantry dominated the situation. Temporarily seduced by the ideology of the petite bourgeoisie, the peasantry constituted the basis of support for the Provisional Govern-