14.08.1997

The situation in Russia

From ‘The Call’, paper of the British Socialist Party, August 2 1917

The news from Russia is appalling. The government turned into a directory, with Kerensky as the first consul; capital punishment restored by the very hands which abolished it in the first days of the Revolution; Lenin, Trotsky and other ‘extremists’ thrown into prison; a severe censorship established over all speeches and writings opposing the war; the Cossacks attacking demonstrators in the streets; a general congress of all the chief organisations of the bourgeoisie, including the Duma, but recently pronounced by Tsereteli to be an assembly of the dead, called together at Moscow, away from the centre of the Revolution - what a change in the few weeks which have elapsed since the socialists entered the government in order to save the Revolution!

Marx once compared the French Revolution with Saturnus who devoured his own sons. In the Russian case it is the sons of the Revolution who are devouring their mother. Having committed the fatal mistake of entering a coalition with the bourgeoisie, the socialists have been sliding down on the inclined plane - at first gradually, and then swifter and swifter until they have found themselves in an alliance with the bourgeois classes against the revolutionary proletariat and its parties.

One need not be a supporter of Lenin’s doctrines and tactics in order to see that the Russian Gironde has now mobilised its forces against the Jacobins, with a budding little Thiers or Bonaparte at its head. And all this on the pretext that the ‘extremists’ are sabotaging the war! As if charges against Liebknecht sounded differently!

But of course it is a mere pretext. The new Gironde is afraid of the political propaganda of the internationalist socialists, and the Kerenskys and Tseretelis have simply succumbed to the imperialist spell.