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work: „State and Revolution“. In the domain of the army particularly, I in my blindness saw nothing but the destruction of the old army, the instrument of oppression in the hands of capitalist State, without perceiving or comprehending the formation of a new army, that is to say of the proletarian army, the Red army, called upon to defend the conquests of the Workers' and Peasants' Revolution of October.
My eyes could not distinguish anything else than the break up of discipline (on which the old army rested) the humiliation and dispersal of the officers (by which the Capitalist state held the army in its hands), my eyes remained blind to the formation of a new command, destined for the new army which was as yet in an embryonic State, to the establishment of a new discipline founded on the enlightened consciousness of the proletarian masses. The measures of legitimate defence, the just repressions of the Workers' and Peasants' Government of Russia (which, whatever political point of view one might accept was the de facto Government of Russia, and which, as such, could not but respond to the blows with which it was threatened and anticipate them as far as possible) were all confounded in my mind with the excesses, the abuses, the robberies committed outside of this Government and in formal contradiction to its laws, by common criminals, often even by counter-revolutionaries acting under the standard of anarchy, and as later on I had the proof, in certain instances, by agents interested in augmenting the disorder in the country, and in bringing about, even at the cost of the worst calamities for the Russian people already so hardly tried,—the downfall
