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of their following. In the election of delegates to the Congress of Soviets, which was to open on November 7, the Bolsheviki had, for the first time, obtained an apparent majority. They had announced in their press that the opening of the Congress would be the signal for an armed uprising; it was charged that they had prevented the holding of elections in many places, that they had intimidated voters, that they had, in many instances, put forward their nominees as antiBolsheviks and so secured their election by fraud. But whatever the truth concerning these charges, the fact remains that they had an apparent majority in the Congress.

On the night of November 6, the coup d'etat took place. Almost without bloodshed, the Provisional Government was overthrown. The Bolsheviki had organized its supporters as Red Guards, and placed these, under military leadership, at strategic points. They occupied the principal government buildings, the telegraph and telephone offices. Part of the Petrograd garrison turned out and supported the Bolsheviki, the other part simply looking on and refusing to participate at all. On the morning of November 7 the members of the Provisional Government were arrested, Kerensky, however, escaping. The Bolsheviki had not met the resistance upon which they had reckoned. A new Government was formed, with Lenin

as President and Trotzky as Foreign Minister. The Soviet regime had begun. Bolshevism was in the saddle in one of the greatest nations in the world.

VI

There was probably not a statesman in Europe, or anywhere in the world for that matter, who believed on November 8, 1917, that the new Russian Government, called the Council of People's Commissaries, which had been proclaimed the day before, could last beyond the end of the year. Its own most influential members were scarcely more optimistic. An American who saw Lenin frequently in those days and enjoyed his confidence has reported that he often referred to the Paris Commune in terms which suggested that he looked upon the Soviet regime as an episode of the same kind. The Paris Commune lasted seventy days. "In (so and so many) days we shall have lasted as long as the Commune," Lenin would say. When the Soviet regime had lasted seventy days he exclaimed. "We have equalled the Commune." After that he often observed "This is the .... day. We have survived longer than the Commune!"

There is an abundance of authoritative evidence to show that the Soviet leaders did not regard themselves as being called upon to establish anything like a permanent State. Numerous utterances by Lenin,

Trotzky, and others, show that they thought of their task as being much simpler, namely, just to hold things together in Russia for a few short weeks until the general European revolution could take place. "Russia is very backward industrially, and of all the important countries of Europe it is the least prepared for Socialism," Lenin told his followers. "If we depended upon ourselves alone, and undertook to build a Socialist State upon the existing economic and cultural basis of Russia, our situation would be quite hopeless. As it is, we have quite another task. Our problem is simply to hold on for a short time, perhaps only a few weeks, but at most only a few months, until the inevitable revolution throughout Europe and America presents to the entire proletariat of the world the real task of achieving Socialism upon the basis of capitalist civilization, and with all the resources of the latter available for the purpose.

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There was no influential leader of the Bolsheviki who took a longer view than this. There was not one who expressed any doubt that the general social revolution was imminent and that it would sweep all Europe. Their Marxist philosophy had prepared the way for this attitude of mind by teaching them to look for, and to depend upon, a great cataclysm. A catastrophic break-up of capitalist civilization, and the emergence of Socialism through the conscious will

and purpose of the triumphant proletariat, was almost universally accepted as part of the quintessence of Marxism. Now it was impossible for these Russian followers of Marx to doubt that war weariness, exhaustion, economic bankruptcy, and shattered institutions and social relations of long standing, would result in revolution in every land. The whole fabric was already trembling. The decisive moment of revolution was at hand.

The Bolshevist leaders, notwithstanding that they had seized the governmental powers, and thus placed themselves at the head of a great State, hardly thought at all of the immense task of social reorganization immediately confronting them. For them it was not a national problem. It was not a problem for Russia, but for civilization. Its solution would have to be undertaken internationally.

The non-Communist may fail to see how this would have helped matters. On the other hand, it is not hard to comprehend the Bolshevist point of view, once we have made allowance for the tendency of Utopian visionaries to reduce complex and intricate problems to an alluring simplicity. Russia lacked machinery and manufactured goods, due to her industrial backwardness. She also lacked the means of producing those things. As a country possessed and governed by the revolutionary proletariat, committed

to the overthrow of capitalism, Russia could hardly be regarded as likely to get her wants supplied by capitalist controlled countries. But if the revolution, instead of being Russian and national in its scope, became international, so that revolutionary Russia was part of a great revolutionary whole, then for the good of the whole the entire resources of the whole would be available. National boundaries would cease to have important political significance. They would be of little more than historic interest. The surplus manufactured goods of such countries as Germany, England, and the United States, as well as the services of their technicians, would be as available for Russia as for themselves. Call that an idle dream if you will, but do not fair to remember that if it was the basis of

their plans.

A "make-shift-for-the-time-being" psychology dominated the struggle of the Bolshevist leaders against the Kerensky regime, and continued to dominate them for some time after the coup d'etat. Had they thought of their impending task as requiring them to establish a permanent State, and to reorganize the national economic life, they never would have been foolish enough to create such tremendous difficulties for themselves, as when they preached insubordination among the soldiers, systematic sabotage and malingering among the factory workers, and the seizure of lands

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