220 THE CLASS STRUGGLE THE STATE IN RUSSIA 221 victory, as Mr. Tereshchenko Department was of leading the nation to peace.
This picture of the impotence of the Provisional Government reaches its climax in the labors of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, which, to use the words of the most loyal Societ of Peasants? Delegates, with partiality filled the offices of the local administrations with the feudal landholders. The efforts of the active portion of the population gain for them the communal selfgovernments, by right of conquest, and, without waiting for the Constituent Assembly, are immediately designated in the statepolice jargon of the Dans, by the term anarchy, and are greeted by the energetic opposition of the government which, by its very composition, is fully protected against all energetic action when it is really of creative character.
In the course of the last few days, this policy of general bankruptcy has found its most repulsive expression in the Kronstadt incident. The vile and out and out corrupt campaign of the bourgeois press against Kronstadt, which is for them the symbol of revolutionary internationalism and of distrust in the government coalition, both of which are emblems of the independent policy of the great masses of the people, not only took possession of the government and of the Soviet leaders, but turned Tseretelli and Skobeleff into ringleaders in the disgusting persecutions of the Kronstadt sailors, soldiers, and workers.
ing all its energies. An essential part of this policy is found in the shameless threats of bloody repressions and the provocations of open violence.
The death struggle of the coalition ministry began on the day of its birth. Revolutionary socialism must do everything in its power to prevent this death struggle from terminating in the convulsion of civil war. The only way to do this is not by a policy of yielding and dodging, which merely wets the appetite of the fresh baked statesmen, but rather a policy of aggressive action all along the line. We must not permit them to isolate themselves: we must isolate them. We must answer the wretched and contemptible actions of the Coalition Government by making clear even to the most backward among the laboring masses the full meaning of this hostile alliance which maskerades publicly in the name of the revolution. To the methods of the propertied classes and of their menshevist social revolutionist appendage in dealing with the questions of food, of industry of agriculture, of war, we must oppose the methods of the proletariat. Only in this way can liberalism be isolated and a leading influence on the urban and rural masses be assured to the revolutionary proletariat. Together with the inevitable downfall of the present government will come the downfall of the present leaders of the Soviet of Workers and Soldiers Delegates. To preserve the authority of the Soviet as a representative of the revolution, and to secure for it a continuance of its functions as a directive power, is now within the power only of the present minority of the Soviet. This will become clearer every day. The epoch of Dual Impotence, with the government not able and the Soviet not daring, is ineluctably culminating in a crisis of unheard of severity. It is our part to husband our energies for this moment, so that the question of authority may be met with in all its size.
At a moment when revolutionary internationalism was systematically displacing patriotic socialism in the factories and workshops and among the soldiers at the front, the socialists in the ministry, obedient to their masters, were risking the hazardous game of overthrowing the revolutionary proletarian advance guard with one single blow, and thus preparing the psychological moment for the session of the Pan Russian Congress of Soviets. To rally the peasant petit bourgeois democracy around the banner of bourgeois liberalism, that ally and captive of Anglo French and American capital, politically to isolate and discipline the proletariat, that is now the principal task, in the realization of which the government bloc of mensheviks and social revolutionaries is expend