214 THE CLASS STRUGGLE THE STATE IN RUSSIA 215 masses would show their readiness to die with ecstacy under this red rag, for Constantinople and the Straits.
But the imperialistic cloven hoof of Milyukov was sticking out too plainly. In order to win over the awakened masses and guide their revolutionary energy into the channel of an offensive on the external front, more intricate methods were required but chiefly, different political parties were needed, with platforms that had not yet been compromised, and reputations that had not yet been sullied.
They were found. In the years of counter revolution, and particularly in the period of the latest industrial boom, capital had subjected to itself, and had mentally tamed many thousands of revolutionists of 1905, being in no wise concerned about their laborite or Marxist notions. And among the socialistic intelligentsia there were therefore rather numerous groups whose palms were itching to take part in the checking of the class struggle, and the training of the masses for patriotic ends.
Hand in hand with this intelligentsia, which had been brought into prominence in the counter revolutionary epoch, went the compromise workers, who had been frightened definitely and finally by the failure of the 1905 revolution, and had since then developed in themselves the sole talent of being agreeable to all sides.
The opposition of the bourgeois classes to Czarism upon an imperialistic foundation, however, had, even before the revolution, provided the necessary basis for a reproachment between the opportunist socialists and the propertied classes. In the Duma, Kerensky and Cheidze built up their policy as an annex to the progressive bloc, and the Gvozdyevs and Bogdanovs merged with the Guchkovs on the War Industry Committees. But the existence of Czarism made an open advocacy of the government patriotism standpoint very difficult. The revolution cleared away all the obstacles of this nature. Capitulating to the capitalist parties was now called a democratic unity, and the discipline of the bourgeois state suddenly became revolutionary discipline, and finally, participation in a capitalist war was looked upon as a defence of the revolution from external defeat.
This nationalistic intelligentsia, which Struve had prognosticated, invoked, and trained, in his paper, Vyekhi, suddenly met with an unexpectedly generous support in the helplessness of the most backward masses of the people, who had been forcibly organized as an army.
It was only because the revolution broke out in the course of a war, that the petit bourgeois elements of city and country at once automatically took on the appearance of an organized force, and began to exert, upon the personnel of the Soviets of Workers and Soldiers Delegates, which won an influence which would have been far beyond the powers of these scattered and backward classes in any but war times. The menshevist populist intelligentsia found in this great number of backwoods, provincial, for the most as yet hardly awakened persons, a support that was at first entirely natural. By leading the petit bourgeois classes on to the path of an agreement with capitalist liberalism, which had again beautifully demonstrated its inability independently to guide the masses of the people, the menshevist populistic intelligentsia, through the pressure of these masses, acquired a certain position even among the proletarian sections, which had been momentarily relegated to a secondary position by the numerical impressiveness of the army.
It might at first seem that all class contradictions had been destroyed, that all social fixtures had been patched up with fragments of a populist menshevist ideology, and that, thanks to the constructive labors of Kerensky, Cheidze, and Dan, a national Burgfrieden had been realized. Therefore, the unparalleled wonderment when an independent proletarian policy again asserted itself, and therefore the savage, in truth disgusting wail against the revolutionary socialists, the destroyers of the universal harmony.
The petit bourgeois intelligentsia, after it had been raised, by the formation of the Soviet of Workers and Soldiers Delegates, to heights for which it was itself entirely unprepared, was frightened more by the idea of responsibility than by anything else, and therefore respectfully handed over their power to the capitalistfeudal government which had issued forth from the womb of the Duma of the Third of June. The organic terror of the petit bour