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What we now read of Scheidemann and Noske, Kautsky and Crispien, Renner and Austerlitz, Otto Bauer and Fritz Adler, Turati and Longuet, of the Fabians and the leaders of the Independent Labor Party in England—all this seems to us, and, in reality, is, a dreary repetition, a paraphrase of an old, familiar song. The Mensheviks have long ago sung it to us. History has played a joke on us and made the opportunists of a backward country anticipate the opportunists of a great many advanced countries.
That all the heroes of the Second International suffered bankruptcy and disgraced themselves on the question of the role and significance of the Soviets and Soviet power; that the leaders of three very important parties which have now left the Second International (namely, the German Independent Social Democratic Party, the French Longuetists and the British Independent Labor Party) have especially "vividly" disgraced themselves on this question; that they have all proved slaves to the prejudices of petit-bourgeois democracy (quite in the spirit of the petit-bourgeois of 1848 who called themselves "social democrats")—all this conveys to us nothing new. We have already seen all of it in the example of the Mensheviks. History has played off this joke: in Russia, in 1905, Soviets were born: in February-October, 1917, they were tampered with by the Mensheviks, who went bankrupt because of their inability to understand the role and significance of the Soviets, and, now that the idea of Soviets has come to life the world over, spreading itself with tremendous rapidity among the proletariat of all countries, the old heroes of the Second International are also everywhere going bankrupt, because, like our Mensheviks, they are unable to understand the true role and significance of Soviets. Experience has shown that, on some very essential points in the proletarian revolution, all countries will inevitably have to repeat Russia's experience.
The successful struggle against what was in reality the parliamentary bourgeois republic, and against the Mensheviks, was begun by the Bolsheviks very cautiously, and, contrary to the view often met with in Europe and America, it was not at all without careful preparation. At the outset of the period
