this whole policy falls to pieces under the first serious blow, Tseretelli and Dan explain to all who have any desire to believe them, that the Revolution was frustrated, not by the inability of the petit bourgeoisie to take all power into its hands, but by the "insurrection" of the Machine-Gun Regiment.
In the course of many years of controversy concerning the character of the Russian Revolution, the Mensheviki have maintained that the true bearers of revolutionary power in Russia have been the petit bourgeois democrats. We always have pointed out that the petit bourgeois democracy is incapable of solving this problem, and that the only power than can guide the revolution to its goal is the proletariat, drawing its strength from the masses of the people. Now History has so decreed that the Mensheviki appeared as the political representatives of the petit bourgeois democracy, in order that they might in their own persons exemplify their complete inability to cope with the problems of power, that is, to assume the leading role in the Revolution.
In Rabochaya Gazeta, that organ of counterfeit, Danified, Danicizing "Marxism," the attempt is made to fix upon us the label of "July Sixteen Men." We have every reason to assert that in the July 16th movement, all our sympathies were absolutely with the workers and soldiers, and not with the military cadets, the Polovtsevs, Liebers, and the "snifflers."[1]
We would deserve contempt were it otherwise. But let the bankrupts of the Rabochaya Gazeta not be too loud in invoking the 16th of July, for that was the day of their political self-destruction. The label "Sixteenth of July Men," if I may use a very mixed metaphor, may be turned against them as a two-edged sword, for on July 16 the rapacious cliques of Czaristic Russia accomplished a coup d'etat with the purpose of placing all the authority of state in their hands. On the 16th of July, 1917, at the moment of the most serious crisis of the Revolution, the petit bourgeois democrats vociferously declared that they were incapable of taking over the state power. Turning their backs with hatred on the revolutionary workers and soldiers, who demanded from them the discharge of their most elementary revolutionary duty, the Sixteenth of July men
- ↑ The "snifflers" were a secret service organization created by the military governor of Petrograd, Col. Polovtsev, with the aid of V. Burtzeff and G. Alexinsky, formerly active in the movement against Czarism, but aligned with the counter-revolutionary moderates during the Revolution itself. The purpose of the "snifflers" was to crush the Bolsheviki.—L. C. F.
