the next moment, the moment when independent activity becomes generalized to the whole population, will be too late for the seizure of State power: The Bolsheviks must take power at once—otherwise a wave of real anarchy may become stronger than we are. The seizure must take place before a mighty burst of creative enthusiasm stems from the people themselves, before the population gains confidence in its unlimited creative powers, before the moment when a wave of real anarchy sweeps away the conditions necessary for the restoration of the old order, the conditions necessary for the seizure of State power.
The moment which contains the conditions for the seizure of State power, the moment on which revolutionary leaders must rely and during which they must act if they are to succeed, is not the moment when the population gains confidence in its own self-powers, in its creative capacities. On the contrary, the insurrection must rely upon that turning point in the history of the growing revolution—when the vacillations in the ranks of the weak, half-hearted and irresolute friends of the revolution are strongest. This is not a moment of self-confidence; it is the moment when the people are close to desperation, the moment when that most painful thing on earth, vacillation, has worn the people out.
The moment for the seizure of power is not a moment of independence, but of anxiety in the face of independence. It is the moment when people are on the verge of independence, when they reach the frontier between the known and the unknown, between the familiar and the new—and temporarily recoil. It is the moment when all the official authorities have been sprung into the air, but when society's individuals have not yet actively appropriated the powers they had vested in the deposed authorities. It is the moment when only one part of the dominant social relation has been sprung into the air—the superincumbent strata; but when the other part of the same social relation—the subordination, the dependence, the helplessness—has not yet been sprung. It is the moment when the frontier between dependence and independence—precisely because it has not yet been crossed—appears to be an unbridgeable chasm. And it is precisely at this frontier, alongside the human beings who are about to cross it, alongside the true agents of the revolution, that the revolutionary frontier officials, the leaders, take their positions. In every revolution there intrude, alongside its true agents, men of a different stamp; some of them survivors of and devotees to past revolutions, without insight into the present movement, but preserving popular influence by their known honesty and courage, or by sheer force of tradition; others mere brawlers, who, by dint of repeating year after year the same set of stereotyped declarations against the government of the day, have sneaked into the reputation of revolutionists of the first water. As far as their power goes, they hamper the real action of the working class, exactly as men of that sort have hampered the full development of every previous revolution. But while hampering the real action of the working class, they
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