Page:Vladimir Ilyich Lenin - Lessons of the Revolution (1918).djvu/31

 the demonstration. But the Essers and Mensheviks, hoping to retain at least a little of their waning influence among the masses, felt impelled to order a general demonstration for June 18. As for the bourgeoisie, it lost its wits out of sheer rage,—recognizing in this move the leaning of the petty bourgeoisie toward the side of the proletariat,—and determined to paralyze the action of the democracy by a military movement on the front.

Indeed, the 18-th of June gave an awe-inspiring victory to the slogans of the revolutionary proletariat, the rallying cries of the Bolsheviks among the Petrograd masses; so on June 19-th the bourgeoisie and the Bonapartist Kerensky announced that the military offensive at the front had begun on that very 18-th of June!

This meant practically the resumption of a war of spoliation, in the interests of the capitalists, against the will of the great majority of the toiling masses. With this renewed belligerency, there was connected, on the one hand, the tremendous growth of chauvinism and the passage of military—and consequently of political—power into the hands of a gang of Bonapartists; on the other hand, the recourse to violent repression of the masses, persecution of the internationalists, abolition of the freedom of propaganda, arrests and wholesale shooting of those who opposed the war.

If the 6-th of May tied the Essers and Menshe-