by the pressure of events and class antagonisms to limit the authority of the Provisional Government, often actually to repudiate it, to assume an attitude that prevented equally the development of a bourgeois authority and policy or of a proletarian policy and authority. The situation was intolerable: it could not promote the revolution, only chaos and reaction.
The increasing resentment against the coalition concluded on May 18 compelled the Executive Committee of the Soviets early in June to issue an explanatory declaration:
"1.—Socialist ministers were sent into the government by the Council of Workers' and Soldiers' Delegates with the definite mandate to secure a general peace by agreement between the nations and not to prolong an imperialistic war in the name of the liberation of nations.
"2.—Socialist participation in the Government does not mean a cessation of the struggle of the classes, but, on the contrary, its prolongation by political power. It was for this reason that the entry of Socialists into the Ministry with representatives of the bourgeois parties was impossible until some of the enemies of the Russian proletariat were interned and others were removed from power by the movement of the revolutionary masses of May 2nd and 3rd.
"3.—The participation of the Socialists in the Government is being carried out on conditions of the most complete liberty being enjoyed by the proletariat, and the army, this liberty being entirely unaffected by martial law, political censorship or other restrictions. Organized control by the working classes of their representatives is effective enough.
"4.—The entry of its representatives into the Government does not mean for the Russian proletariat the weakening of the bonds uniting it with Socialists of all countries who are struggling against Imperialism, but, on the contrary, the strengthening of these bonds by a more intense common struggle for a general peace."
Truly, "Socialist participation in the Government does not mean a cessation of the struggle of the classes," but it did mean a strengthening of the bourgeoisie as against the proletariat, it did mean a temporary confusion and weakening of the struggle, the conscious struggle, of the proletariat: a conclusion amply proven by the fact that the struggle against coalition became the centre of the revolutionary class struggle of the proletarian and peasant masses. The purpose of coalition, directly and indirectly, consciously and unconsciously, was to castrate the revolutionary struggle by tranforming it from a struggle of revolutionary mass action into the wrangles and bickerings in the ministry between the Socialist representatives and the Cadets. Instead of action, words; instead of revolution, conciliation!
But conciliation breaks down miserably under the impact of violent class antagonisms, in the stress of revolutionary events. The Menshevist and Social-Revolutionary policy might have prevailed in a pre-revolutionary period; it was utterly futile during a revolution. The policy of conciliation, of the co-operation of classes, is possible when the masses are apathetic for then the masses do not act against the inevitable conversion of the co-operation of classes into the supremacy of the capitalist class. But in a revolution, the masses are in motion; the developments of years are compressed into months and days; class relations and class antagonisms are revealed acutely, starkly, and uncompromisingly. Conciliation requires compromise; but in a revolution, with its crises and upheavals, compromise must go to the root of things, must be fundamental: in other
