ments as are the cereal monopoly, the control of production and rationing, the restriction of the issue of paper money, a regular exchange of corn for merchandise, &c.
These measures everybody recognises[1] are an absolute necessity, nd they have begun to be applied in many places. But the realisation of these policies is trammelled by the resistance of the big proprietors and of the capitalists, resistance exercised through the agency of the Kerensky Government (a government at bottom bourgeois and bonapartist), through the agency of the administrative apparatus of the former Government by means of the direct or indirect pressure of Russian and Allied finance-capital.
Deploring the resignation of Piecheckonov and the failure of the taxation and of the cereal monopoly, I. Prilejaïev wrote quite recently in the Dielo Naroda (No. 147): "The absence of courage and the spirit of decision, which has marked all our governments, has been due to their composition. … The democratic revolution ought not to hesitate, it ought itself to exhibit initiative and to interfere systematically in the economic chaos. … If ever the necessity of a positive and absolute power made itself felt, it is now."
That is the truth. Here are words of gold. Only, there is one thing that has not struck the author: it is that the firm line, the courage and the spirit of decision are not questions of persons, they depend on the class that is capable of showing these qualities. Now this class is uniquely the proletariat. A courageous, resolute authority which takes a firm line, what is it but the dictatorship of the proletariat and of the poorer ranks of the peasant class? Without doubt I. Prilejaïev yearns after that dictatorship.
What will this dictatorship actually signify? The definite wiping out of "Kornilovians" and the democratisation of the army. The day following its installation it will be welcomed with enthusiasm by 99 per cent. of the army. In that it gives the land to the peasants and full power to the local committees of peasants, will not the dictatorship be supported without reserve by the latter? What Piecheckonov only promises ("the capitalist resistance is destroyed" said he in his famous speech in the Soviet Congress), the dictatorship will actually realise, and to do that it
- ↑ Even the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries; they were a party to the programme adopted by the majority of the State Conference on August 14.
