Lessons of the Revolution/Introduction

by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

INTRODUCTION.

What is the Soviet?

Of the many terms in which the social and political sciences abound, the term «people» is perhaps the vaguest. Indeed, we have no clear-cut image and hence mo effective idea of this apparently concrete entity People. Intimately connected with this term, no less vague and still more confusing, is the word «government», a word depicting a realty, as concrete and as hard as the age-old rocks themselves. The relation, however, obtaining between these two realities is in one respect clear; in as much as all the power of a people is vested in its governmet, the people is disvested of all power,—a relation so typically, and as it were monumentally expressed in the cry, «L'état c'est moi», desperately uttered by the head of the French government during the period of its ultimate decay.

The Russian Revolution, now occupying the center of the quaking world's stage, allows the careful observer to catch a glimpse of what that entity People really must be. The Russian people, struggling to assert itself, has in the travail of the Revolution given birth to a new creation flexible, mobile and yet persistent as are the thought and will it expresses. This creation is, the Soviets.