government cannot institute a military prison for the workers, in the manner of Kornilov, Hindenburg and the imperialists in general: the traditions, the memories, the times, the habits and the institutions of the revolution are still too fresh in the minds of the people. But it is no longer possible to take serious measures in the democratic-revolutionary path, for it is impregnated to the very marrow with the bourgeois spirit, and it is bound by its coalition with the bourgeoisie on whom it is dependent with a whole mass of agreements and whose privileges it dare not touch.
9.—The Government's Destruction of the Work of Democratic Organisations
We have examined the different methods and means by which a struggle is made against the catastrophe of famine. We have seen everywhere the flagrant contradiction which appears between democracy and the government by the S.R. and Menshevik bloc, which supports it. To prove that this contradiction does not exist only in our imagination and that the demonstration that it is incapable of solution lies in the fact that the conflicts which are its results have a material significance, it is enough to recall two typical "schedules," two characteristic lessons of our half-year of revolution:
The History of the "Reign" of Polchinsky[1] is the first lesson.
The second is the History of the "Reign" and the fall of Piecheckonov.
Fundamentally, the measures against the catastrophe and the famine, which we have described above, are intended to encourage by every means (even to the point of constraint) the grouping together of the people, and above all of the oppressed classes, the workers and the peasants, and particularly the poor peasants. And it is in this way that the people have agreed, spontaneously, to struggle against the burdens and the unheard-of scourges of the war. Tsarism thwarted by every means in its power the spontaneous association of the people. After its fall a multitude of democratic organisations arose and developed rapidly throughout Russia. The struggle against the catastrophe was carried on by democratic organisations, created spontaneously by the people, by all sorts of
- ↑ Engineer and Man of Affairs, attached to the Ministry of Commerce, under Kerensky, he favoured the "sabotage" of the industrials.
