United States or Norway ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Numerically, the principal revolutionary party in the first epoch was the party of Social-Revolutionists. I have already referred to its formlessness and variegated composition. The revolution led inevitably to the dismemberment of such of its members as had joined it under the banner of populism.
We left it to the Left Social-Revolutionists to continue the hopeless efforts for coalition. Our policy was, on the contrary, to line up the toiling lower classes against the representatives of organizations which supported the Kerensky regime. This uncompromising policy caused considerable friction and even division in the upper circles of our party.
The Social-Revolutionists and the Minimalists proceeded to legalize the Maximalists this, to be sure, only retrospectively and only half-way, inasmuch as they scented possible dangers in the future.
The programme of the Social-Revolutionists created wholly out of nebulous humanitarian formulas, substituting sentimental generalizations and moralistic superstructures for a class-conscious attitude, proved to be the thing best adapted for a spiritual vestment of this type of leaders.
They pushed to the front the Social-Revolutionists and Mensheviki, who, in the attack upon us acquired all that energy which they had lacked during the period when they were a semi-governing power. Their organs circulated the most amazing rumors and lies. In their name it was that the proclamations containing open appeals to crush the new government were issued.
This is why in this first period of the revolution even the masses of workingmen proved so much more receptive to the political ideology of the Social-Revolutionists and the Mensheviki. All the more so, since the revolution had awakened the hitherto dormant and backward proletarian masses, thus making uninformed intellectual radicalism into a preparatory school for them.
The masses of soldiers in the trenches could not, of course, reach the conclusion that the war, in which they had participated for nearly three years, had changed its character merely because certain new persons, who called themselves "Social-Revolutionists" or "Mensheviki," were taking part in the Petrograd Government.
The leading place in this organization was taken by the so-called Committee for the Defence of the Revolution, organized by the local Duma and the Central Executive Committee of the former regime. Here and there Right Social-Revolutionists and Mensheviki held sway.
More and more extensive became this sabotage, which was organized mostly by Social-Revolutionists and Mensheviki, and which was supported by funds furnished by the banks and the Allied Embassies. The stronger the Soviet government became in Petrograd, the more the bourgeois groups placed their hopes on military aid from without.
Word Of The Day