Many people, especially left-wing politicians, have a tendency to regard "soviet" power as a State power different from all the rest, to be sure, but painting that difference in the rosiest of hues: "Soviet power," they tell us, "is a worker and peasant power and, as such, has a great future ahead of it." There can be no more absurd assertion. "Soviet" power is a power no better and no worse than any other. Currently, it is every bit as wobbly and absurd as any State power in general. In certain respects, it is even more absurd than the rest. Having achieved total political domination over the country, it has become the unchallenged master of its economic resources and, not content with that crassly exploitative situation, it has sensed, welling up from within itself, the deceptive sentiment of a spiritual "perfection," a sentiment that it seeks to peddle to the country's toiling revolutionary people. This has left its proletarian "spirit"...
“Russian Revolution” can mean three things: either the entire revolutionary movement, from the revolt of the Decembrists until the present; or only the two consecutive uprisings of 1905 and 1917; or, finally, only the great explosion of 1917. In this work, “Russian Revolution” is used in the first sense, as the entire movement. This is the only way the reader will be able to understand the development and totality of events as well as the present situation in the U.S.S.R. A relatively complete history of the Russian Revolution would require more than one volume. This would have to be a long-term project carried out by future historians. Here we are concerned with a more limited project whose aims are: (a) to provide understanding of the entirety of the movement; (b) to underline its essential elements, which are largely unknown abroad; (c) to make possible certain evaluations and conclusions. As the wor...
Part IV. Repression Chapter 1. The Preparations One notable task had been successfully performed by the “Soviet power”: in the spring of 1918 it already had pushed the organization of its governmental and statist cadres — cadres of police, the Army, and those of the “Soviet” bureaucracy — fairly far. Thus the base of the dictatorship was created, sufficiently solid, and completely subordinated to those who had established it and who were maintaining it. It was possible to count on it. It was with these forces of coercion, disciplined and blindly obedient, that the Bolshevik government crushed several attempts at independent action which were made here and there. Also it was with the help of those forces, rapidly enlarging, that it ended by submitting the Russian masses to its fierce dictatorship. And it was with those same forces, once it was sure of the unreserved obedience and passivity of the ma...