216 THE CLASS STRUGGLE THE STATE IN RUSSIA 217 geois in the presence of the sanctity of state power, which was perfectly transparent in the case of the populists (laborites. was veiled, in the case of the menshevik patriots, by doctrinaire notions as to the inadmissibility of having socialists assume the burden of power in a bourgeois revolution.
Thus there came about the dual authority, which might with much more truth be termed a Dual Impotence. The capitalist bourgeoisie assumed authority in the name of order and of a war for victory; yet, without the Soviet of Deputies, it could not rule; the latter relation to the government was that of an awed halfconfidence, combined with a fear lest the revolutionary proletariat, in some unguarded gesture, might upset the whole business.
The cynically provocative foreign policy of Milyukov brought forth a crisis. Being aware of the full extent of the panic in the ranks of the petit bourgeois leaders when confronted with problems of power, the bourgeois party began availing itself, in this domain, of downright blackmail: by threatening a government strike, e. to resign any participation in authority, they demanded that the Soviet furnish them with a number of decoy socialists, whose function in the coalition ministry was to be the general strengthening of the confidence in the government on the part of the masses, and, in this way, the cessation of dual authority.
foreseen in the Amsterdam resolution. Yet they were merely repeating, in parrot fashion, the argumentation of Belgian and French ministerialism, while they continued constantly invoking the exceptional nature of the circumstances. Kerensky, under whose long winded theatricality there is, nevertheless, some trace of reality, very appropriately classed the Russian ministerialism under the same category as that of Western Europe, and stated, in his Helsingfors speech, that thanks chiefly to him, Kerensky, the Russian socialists had in two months traveled a distance that it had taken the western socialists ten years to accomplish. Truly Marx was not wrong when he called revolution the locomotive of history!
The coalition government had been sentenced by History before it was established. If it had eben formed immediately after the downfall of Czarism, as an expression of the revolutionary unity of the nation, it might possibly have held in check, for a time, the external struggle of the forces of the revolution. But the first government was the Guchkov Milyukov Government. It was permitted to exist only long enough to expose the full falsity of national unity, and to awaken the revolutionary resistance of the proletriat against the bourgeois propaganda to prostitute the revolution in the interests of imperialism. The obviously makeshift coalition ministry could not, under these circumstances, stave off a calamity, it was itself destined to become the chief bone of contention, the chief source of schism and divergence in the ranks of revolutionary democracy. Its political existence for of its activities we shall not speak is simply one long, dissolution, decently enveloped in vast quantities of words.
To contend against a complete breakdown on the economic, and, particularly, on the food question side, the Economic Department of the Executive Committee of the Soviet of Workers and Soldiers Delegates worked out a plan for an extensive system of state management in the most important branches of industry. The members of the Economic Department differ from the Political mangers of the Soviet not so much in their political tendencies as in a serious acquaintance which the economic situation of the country. For this very reason they were led to conBefore the pistol point of ultimatum, the menshevist patriots hastened to slough off their last vestiges of Marxist prejudice against participation in a bourgeois government, and brought on to the same path the laborite leaders of the Soviet, who were not embarassed by any supercargo of principle or prejudice. This was most manifest in the person of Chernov, who came back from Zimmerwald, Kienthal, where he had excommunicated Vandervelde, Guesde, and Sembat out of Socialism only to enter the ministry of Prince Lvoff and Shingariov. To be sure, the Russian menshevik patriots did point out that Russian ministerialism had nothing in common with French and Belgian ministerialism, being an outgrowth of very exceptional circumstances, as had been