and Miliukoff, of dissolving the Imperial Duma, of closing down the Rietch and other bourgeois newspapers and bringing them before the courts. It is particularly the Left Social-Revolutionaries[1] who must be pushed in this direction.
It would be erroneous to believe that we are turning away from our principle objective: the conquest of power by the proletariat. We have, on the contrary, got considerably nearer to it, but indirectly, by a flanking movement. And we must at the very same moment agitate against Kerensky—but let the agitation be indirect rather than direct—by insisting on an active war against Kornilov. Only the active development of that war can lead us to power, but of that we must speak as little as possible in our agitation (we keep it well in mind that even to-morow events may compel us to take power, and that then we will not let it go). In my opinion, these points should be communicated in a letter (a private one) to our agitators, to our propagandists' training groups and schools, and to the members of the Party in general. As to the phrases about the defence of the country, about the single revoluntionary battle line of revolutionary democracy, about support of the Provisional Government, &c., they must be mercilessly combated because they are nothing but phrases. Now is the time for action: these phrases, gentlemen of the Social-Revolutionary and the Menshevik parties, have already been too much depreciated by your use of them. Now is the time for action, we must wage the war against Kornilov as revolutionaries, carying the masses with us, awakening them, inflaming them (and Kerensky is afraid of the masses, he is afraid of the people). It is precisely in the war against the Germans that action is now necessary: it is necessary immediately and unreservedly to propose peace to them on definite terms. If that is done, there will either be an early peace or else a revolutionary war[2]; if not all the Mensheviks and Social-Revolutionaries will remain the lackeys of imperialism.
