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indicated, we did not call for the overthrow of the government, but explained the impossibility of overthrowing it without a preliminary change in the personnel and disposition of the Soviets. We did not proclaim a boycott of the bourgeois parliament, of the Constitutent Assembly, but said—after the April, 1917, conference of our party officially, in the name of the organization—that a bourgeois republic with a Constituent Assembly is better than one without, but that a "workmen's and peasants'" Soviet republic is better than any bourgeois democratic, parliamentary, republic. Without such a careful, substantial, cautious and prolonged preparation, we could not have obtained victory in October, 1917, neither could we have maintained it.
