The problem of the Commune was to dissolve the National Assembly. Unfortunately it did not succeed in doing so. To-day Kautsky seeks to discover for its criminal intentions some mitigating circumstances.
He points out that the Communards had as their opponents in the National Assembly the monarchists, while we in the Constituent Assembly had against us … Socialists, in the persons of the S.R.s, and the Mensheviks. A complete mental eclipse! Kautsky talks about the Mensheviks and the S.R.s, but forgets our sole serious foe—the Cadets. It was they who represented our Russian Thiers party—i.e., a bloc of property owners in the name of property: and Professor Miliukov did his utmost to imitate the "little great man." Very soon indeed—long before the October Revolution—Miliukov began to seek his Gallifet in the generals Kornilov, Alexeiev, then Kaledin, Krasnov, in turn. And after Kolchak had thrown aside all political parties, and had dissolved the Constituent Assembly, the Cadet Party, the sole serious bourgeois party, in its essence monarchist through and through, not only did not refuse to support him, but on the contrary devoted more sympathy to him than before.
The Mensheviks and the S.R.s played no independent role amongst us—just like Kautsky's party during the revolutionary events in Germany. They based their whole policy upon a coalition with the Cadets, and thereby put the Cadets in a position to dictate quite irrespective of the balance of political forces. The Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik Parties were only an intermediary apparatus for the purpose of collecting, at meetings and elections, the political confidence of the masses awakened by the revolution, and for handing it over for disposal by the counter-revolutionary imperialist party of the Cadets—independently of the issue of the elections.
The purely vassal-like dependence of the S.R.s and Menshevik majority on the Cadet minority itself represented a very thinly-veiled insult to the idea of "democracy." But this is not all.
In all districts of the country where the regime of "democracy" lived too long, it inevitably ended in an open coup d'etat of the counter-revolution. So it was in the Ukraine, where the democratic Rada, having sold the Soviet Government to German imperialism, found itself overthrown by the monarchist Skoropadsky. So it was in the Kuban, where the democratic Rada found itself under the heel of Denikin. So it was—and this was the most important experiment of our "democracy"—in Siberia, where the Constituent Assembly, with the formal supremacy of the S.R.s and the Mensheviks, in the absence of the Bolsheviks, and the de facto guidance of the Cadets, led in the end to the dictatorship of the Tsarist Admiral Kolchak. So it was, finally, in the north, where the Constituent Assembly government of the Socialist-Revolutionary Chaikovsky became merely a tinsel decoration for the rule of counter-revolutionary generals, Russian and British. So it was, or is, in all the small Border States—in Finland, Esthonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Georgia, Armenia—where, under the formal banner of "democracy," there is being consolidated the supremacy of the landlords, the capitalists, and the foreign militarists.
THE PARIS WORKER OF 1871 AND THE PETROGRAD PROLETARIAN OF 1917
One of the most coarse, unfounded, and politically disgraceful comparisons which Kautsky makes between the Commune and Soviet Russia is touching the character of the Paris worker in 1871 and the Russian proletarian of 1917-19. The first Kautsky depicts as a revolutionary enthusiast capable of a high measure of self-sacrifice; the second, as an egoist and a coward, an irresponsible anarchist.
The Parisian worker has behind him too definite a past to need revolutionary recommendations—or protection from the praises of the present Kautsky. None the less, the Petrograd proletarian has not, and cannot have, any reason for avoiding a comparison with his heroic elder brother. The continuous three years' struggle of the Petrograd workers—first for the conquest of power, and then for its maintenance and consolidation—represents an exceptional story of collective heroism and self-sacrifice, amidst unprecedented tortures in the shape of hunger, cold, and constant perils.
Kautsky, as we can discover in another connection, takes for contrast with the flower of the Communards the most sinister elements of the Russian proletariat. In this respect also he is in no way different from the bourgeois sycophants, to whom dead Communards always appear infinitely more attractive than the living.
The Petrograd proletariat seized power four and a half decades after the Parisian. This period has told enormously in our favor. The petty bourgeois craft character of old and partly of new Paris is quite foreign to Petrograd, the centre of the most concentrated industry in the world. The latter circumstances has extremely facilitated our tasks of agitation and organization, as well as the setting up of the Soviet system.