March 1917 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Author:Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
Published: 2019-09-26T16:00:00+00:00

He went into a telephone booth and tried to call a captain he knew at District headquarters who was on duty there that evening—to learn the latest news.

The captain replied that the Kremlin, the Arsenal, and all the last units had gone over to the side of the revolution. General Mrozovsky had just been arrested in his apartment.

Well, he’d dawdled long enough.

[273]

It had been a difficult day for the Executive Committee. After a brief break, they again met in the second half of the day, to the drone of the disorderly Soviet through the door—and under threat of that desperate soldiery breaking in at any moment in search of justice. (They’d been wrong to allow one man elected from each company; too many soldiers were gathering.) But no, Sokolov was still coping with them somehow, and good for him. They were hollering there but not breaking in here.

Meanwhile the EC had roused itself to discuss the terms of a handover of power to the bourgeoisie, and Himmer was sucking the sweetest part out of the theoretical marrow.

In the new conditions of democracy, beginning with the struggle to the death against the bourgeoisie, they shouldn’t rob the bourgeoisie of its hope of winning this struggle. Therefore, as they started out they mustn’t set overly harsh terms of power. On the contrary, the bourgeoisie had to be lured to take power. There was one main condition: ensure absolute and unlimited freedom to agitate and organize in the country! This we need more than anything else! Right now we’re scattered. But in a few weeks we’ll have a solid network of class, party, professional, and soviet organizations, and if we also have full freedom to agitate, then the bourgeoisie can never take us and the liberated masses will no longer capitulate to the propertied clique. The forms of a European bourgeois republic will not take hold here, and the revolution will intensify.

At the same time, this demand—freedom to agitate—was so much a generally recognized democratic demand that the bourgeoisie simply couldn’t refuse us. And if we add to this a general amnesty? And, in principle, a Constituent Assembly? How can they refuse? They themselves have been proclaiming this since ’05! And for us, this is quite sufficient! For now we need nothing more, even about land, even economic demands. We mustn’t frighten the bourgeoisie! We mustn’t even demand a declaration of a republic. That will come of its own accord. And we especially mustn’t breathe a word about a policy of peace. That would frighten them off for good. We can’t demand Zimmerwald of Milyukov. That’s nonsense plain and simple. If we unveil our entire peace program, Milyukov won’t take power. And if we unveil just a part, Western socialists will be amazed at how truncated our program is. But there is no reason to worry. Given freedom to agitate, we will achieve everything necessary afterward.

“Comrades, who doesn’t know that I myself have been a defeatist and internationalist throughout the war? But right

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.