The new government was the Soviets, federated and assuming all the functions of the state,—the self-government of the producing class. The local Soviet was the local authority of government, elected directly by the suffrage of the workers in the factories and the peasants in the fields; these elections were frequent, and the representatives were at all times freely recallable by their constituents. The local Soviets elected delegates to the All-Russian Congress of Soviets, on the basis of proportional representation, and this Congress was the supreme governing body of Russia. The Congress elected the members of the Council of People's Commissaires, and a Central Executive Committee, also on the basis of proportional representation; this Committee sat permanently during the intervals between sessions of the Congress, and directed the activity of the Council of People's Commissaires. At the session of the Congress, each Commissaire and the Central Executive Committee rendered reports; the decision of the Congress on all matters was supreme. The new regime abolished the parliamentary system and the complicated bureaucratic machinery of the bourgeois state; it united legislative and executive functions. This flexible system of government was instantly responsive to the will of the people; it was the utmost in democracy,—not that bourgeois democracy which is simply a form of authority of the appropriating over the producing class, but the free, conscious expression of the initiative, activity and interests of the organized producers.
The Soviet state presents, however, a dual character: it is a democracy in its attitude and relation to the producing class, but a stern and unrelenting dictatorship toward the bourgeoisie. This dual character is the expression of the transition period from Capitalism to Socialism, of the requirements of crushing the resistance of the counter-revolutionary elements, destroying the political power of the Capitalist Class, completing the destruction of the bourgeois regime, and gradually introducing the relations and institutions of Communist Socialism. In this transition period the state assumes the form of a dictatorship of the revolutionary proletariat, an instrument for the crushing of the bourgeoisie in the inevitable civil war.
Civil war ensued immediately upon the assumption of power by
producers under the intellectual lead of the central towns of their districts, and there secured to them, in the workingmen, the natural trustees of their interests. … It was essentially a working class government, the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of labor.—Karl Marx, The Civil War in France.
