Page:Vladimir Ilyich Lenin - Lessons of the Revolution (1918).djvu/43

 dical but even such as would limit the rights of capital, the rights of «sacred private property». Thus in all «coalition» Ministries which include Socialists, the inevitable consequence is that the Socialists, however conscientious and personally, irreprochable, remain in reality a mere screen for the bourgeois government, a lightning rod to divert the popular indignation from the government, a tool by, which to foil the masses. It was so with Louis Blane in 1848, it has been so since then time and time again in England and France when Socialists participated in the government; it was so too with Tchernov and Tseretelli in 1917—and so it will be as long as the capitalist order exists and is supported by an outworn, bourgeois, bureacratic administrative apparatus.

The Soviets of Workmen's, Soldiers' and Peasants' Delegates are invaluable for the very reason that they represent a new, incomparably higher, incomparably more democratic  of administrative apparatus. The Essers and Mensheviks did everything possible and impossible to convert the Soviets (particulary the Petrograd Soviet, and the All-Russian Central Executive Committe) into mere talking machines busy, under the pretext of «control», with formulating futile resolutions and humble petitions which the government disregarded in the most polite and affable manner. But the fresh breeze of the Kornilov adventure, pregnant with threatening tempest, forced the Soviet to cast off, for a time, all that