The Gift of Orientation.
LENIN possessed the exceptional ability of orientation and Marxian far-sightedness. As a realist in class politics he quickly perceived the nature of bourgeois democracy. But it was in this field that great efforts had to be made to free oneself from historic traditions. For was not Lenin the founder of the Social-Democracy which had inscribed on its banner that the way to socialism lies thru democracy? Yet in spite of all this he was successful in destroying all fetishes of democracy. He succeeded in this because of the revolution which in its development had to overcome these democratic obstacles. He did not shrink even from dissolving the Constituent Assembly, which had been a sacred thing in the minds of many generations of Russian intellectuals. Political democracy was never able to blind his eyes to the social and economic problems of the revolution. As against bourgeois democracy he placed the democracy of the proletariat.
International reformism saw in this act of Lenin's his heaviest sin, while in reality it was one of his greatest contributions to the proletarian class struggle. The civil war in Russia had exposed the fractions and parties, which had been fighting under the banner of democracy and the Constituent Assembly, as real counter-revolutionists. The last years of struggle in the West have proved very convincingly that the democratic co-operation between the Social-Democracy and the bourgeoisie is nothing more than betrayal of the working class.
27
