12.06.1997

A socialist government in Russia

From The Call, paper of the British Socialist Party, June 7 1917

Things in Russia are once more approaching a crisis. M Konovalov, minister of trade and industry, has resigned because he could not agree to the scheme for regulating the conditions of labour, propounded by Skobolev, the social democrat minister of labour, and has declared that the socialists must take over the entire business of government.

We agree. It is useless to try to prop up by a few socialist hostages a bourgeois government which does not enjoy the confidence of the revolutionary people, just as it is mischievous to allow the bourgeoisie to wield unlimited power at a time when an external war demands watchfulness at home and abroad.

Timidity of thought and attachment to doctrines allowed an experiment in purely bourgeois government with consequences that nearly proved fatal. The next experiment of a coalition government is also breaking down, as it must do if the socialists in the government remain true to their faith. Hence a purely socialist government is the only and really the best way out.

Lenin once more proved right when he demanded right from the first a government of the revolutionary proletariat in town and country. Such a government would soon bring about external and domestic peace - the former by compelling the Allies to revise their terms in accord with the Russian principle of no annexations and no indemnities, and the latter by a series of fundamental reforms affecting the position of the peasantry and the industrial working class.

To what lengths a socialist government could go in the direction of such reforms cannot be foreseen in advance. But what foundations will have been laid by it will remain even after a constituent assembly and will make Russia the most advanced country in the world.