governmental power when conditions convert criticism into the necessity for action. Instead of action—phrases; instead of revolution—a paltering with the revolutionary tasks.
On May 2, when the masses burst forth in an elemental protest against the Provisional Government, the Council of Workers' and Soldiers' Delegates might, and should, have constituted itself the government. Its failure to do so marked the decline of its power and influence as then constituted; the revolutionary task now became that of revolutionizing the Council, of discarding its old policy and personnel. And this process of revolutionary transformation could develop only out of the masses, not out of the Council's intellectual representatives; these representatives had to be thrust aside, brutally and contemptuously.
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The first phase of the Russian Revolution consists of the week March 8 to March 15, resulting in the overthrow of Czarism. The first stage of the Revolution ends with the formation of the coalition government on May 19,—the stage of the bourgeois revolution and the establishment of the bourgeois republic. Part One, by Lenin, deals with this first stage.
Sources: Articles in Pravda, the central organ of the Bolsheviki published in Petrograd: "Letters from Abroad, Number One," and "Our Position;" a lecture delivered by Lenin in Switzerland shortly before his departure for Russia; a speech to the Ismailoff regiment in Petrograd; a pamphlet, "Letter on Tactics;" and a pamphlet on "Political Parties in Russia,"—all published during March and April. Note: all dates are, new style, not Russian style.
