of the workers and peasants. At the present moment, political power in Russia still rests in the hands of the bourgeoisie, who are obliged to make merely partial concessions (to withdraw them the next day), to scatter promises (which are never kept), and to find ways of masking their domination (to deceive the people by the appearance of "a loyal coalition," &c.). In words, we have a popular, democratic, revolutionary Government; in reality, we are in the presence of a Government anti-popular, anti-democratic, counter-revolutionary, bourgeois. There lies the fundamental contradiction existing hitherto, which has caused this instability, these oscillations of power, and which has provoked this succession of ministries to which Messieurs the Social Revolutionaries and Mensheviks have lent themselves with a zeal so disastrous (to the people).
Either the dissolution of the Soviets and their inglorious death, or all power to the Soviets; that is what I said before the All-Russia Congress of Soviets at the beginning of the month of June, 1917, and the history of the months of July and August have fully confirmed the truth of those words. Only Soviet power can be stable and actually depend on the majority of the people, whatever may say the flunkeys of the bourgeoisie, Potresov,[1] Plekhanov and others, whose explanations of an "enlargement of the basis of power" result in effect in a transmission of power to an infinitesimal minority of the population, to the bourgeoisie, to the exploiters.
Soviet power alone can be stable; it alone cannot be overthrown even in the most tortured hours of the most stormy revolution, it only will be able to assure a wide and steady development of the revolution, with the peaceful concurrence of all parties inside the Soviets. But if it does not exist, there will be hesitations, irresolution, instability, innumerable crises, comedies of ministerial resignations and new shufflings of portfolios, explosions to the right and to the left.
But frequently, if not invariably, the slogan "Power to the Soviets" is understood in a completely false fashion. In effect it is taken to mean a ministry recruited by the parties forming the majority of the Soviets, and it is this profoundly erroneous opinion that we wish to examine in detail.
- ↑ One of the founders of Social Democracy, leader of the Menshevik liquidators, partisan-like Plekhanov, of simple bourgeois democracy.
