was that the Bolsheviks, after the ruin of the old army, and before the building up of the Red one—that they, with scarcely any armed power, held out in February and March, 1918. That the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly did not cause a movement to be set on foot anywhere against the Bolsheviks will be understood only by those who reflect that they took over power as the representatives of the decisive majority of the people.
Power therefore fell to the peasants and workers by a spontaneous historical process which broke the domination of the bourgeoisie and their Menshevik supporters. The peasants had no party representation. (The Left Socialist Revolutionaries wished to represent them but did not. They represented part of the Intellectual section which had not much support amongst the peasantry.) The proletariat, who controlled the means of communication and the towns, and who possessed organs of government in the trade unions, and the Soviets of the Bolshevik Party, were masters of the situation. What ought they to have done? Herr Kautsky, who was opposed to the taking over of power by the Russian proletariat (he conceals this in his book) takes these facts for granted and gives the Russian proletariat the following advice: "No class voluntarily renounces the power it has acquired no matter what the circumstances may have been under which it gained its dominating position. It would have been foolish to have demanded such renunciation from the Russian and Hungarian proletariat, on account of the backward condition of their countries. But a Socialist party, informed by the real Marxist spirit, would have accommodated the problems which it placed before the proletariat for the time being to the material and physical conditions prevailing, and would not have demanded immediate and complete socialization in such a country of undeveloped capitalist production as Russia.” It is very gracious of Herr Kautsky to admit that the Russian proletariat cannot give up its power. His pamphlet of last year contained the advice to the Russian
