IV
WHAT NEXT?
There is hardly any room for doubt that the present government, which is the incarnation of uncertain and malevolent incompetence, will not hold out against the Moscow attack, and will suffer new changes. It is not in vain that General Kornilov explains that we need not fear a new crisis of power. Such a crisis at the present moment can be most quickly overcome by a new swing to the right. Whether Kerensky will obtain, under these circumstances, an additional degree of independence from the organized control of the democracy, which will be replaced by an all the more real "unseen government" of the imperialistic cliques; whether the new government will stand in some definite relation with that general staff of the propertied classes which will be created without a doubt by the Moscow Conference; what is to be the share of the "socialistic" Bonapartists in the new government combination,—all these are questions of secondary importance. But even if the bourgeois attack should be repulsed and the Moscow Conference should culminate in a new stepping out from the government on the part of the Cadets, the arrogated power of the "revolutionary democracy" would be by no means equivalent to a real revolutionary-democratic power. Bound hand and foot by their obligations against workers and soldiers in reserve, the official leaders of the Soviet would be obliged to continue their policy of double-dealing and opportunism. By leaving the ministry, Konovalov simply shifted his mission to the shoulders of Skobeleff. The Kerensky-Tseretelli Ministry, even without the Cadets, would continue to carry out a semi-Cadet program. The elimination of the Cadets is but a drop in the bucket; what is needed is new blood and new methods.
The Moscow Conference in any event closes and summarizes that entire phase of the Revolution in which the leading role was played by the Social-Revolutionary and Menshevik tactics of co-operation with the bourgeoisie, a co-operation which was based on a renunciation of the independent aims of the Revolution, on
