Page:Nikolai Lenin - On the Road to Insurrection (1926).pdf/96

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88
ON THE ROAD

Rokhovitch, the representative of the capitalists, has shown himself, so we see, better informed than the representatives of democracy. It is worthy of notice that it is always the bourgeois newspapers, the Reitch and the Birjovka, which have the best information on what is being done by the Kerensky government.

What remains to be said? The position is clear: the capitalists have entrance into the government and in fact exercise the power. Kerensky is only their hack, whom they order about when and how they please. The interests of the tens of millions of workers and of peasants are sacrificed to a handful of the rich.

How do our S.R.'s and Mensheviks justify this abominable violation of the people's rights? Perhaps they have addressed an appeal to the workers and the peasants declaring before all Russia that after such a scandal the place for Kerensky and his colleagues is no longer in the government, but in prison?

Not on your life! the S.R.'s and the Mensheviks, in the person of their "economic section," have merely limited themselves to adopting the threatening resolution mentioned above. They declared there that the rise in the price of cereals effected by the Kerensky government is a "fatal measure striking the most deadly blow at the measures for feeding the people as well as to economic life," and that the putting into force of this fatal measure is a direct violation of the law.

Such are the results of this policy of conciliation and compromise.

The government has violated the law to please the rich, the great landed proprietors and the capitalists, by taking a measure which ruins control, disorganises the machinery of feeding the people and wholly prevents the recovery of our financial stability: and the S.R.'s and the Mensheviks continue to extol their agreement with the commercial and the industrial classes, to hold conferences with Terechtchenko, to treat Kerensky gently, and they are content merely with writing a resolution of protest which the government coolly tosses into the waste-paper basket.

It can easily be made as clear as daylight that the S.R.'s and the Mensheviks have betrayed the people and the revolution, and that it is the Bolsheviks who are really the leaders of the masses, even of the S.R. and Menshevist masses. Only the acquisition of power by the proletariat, directed by the Bolshevik party, will make it possible