There are scraps of truth in this rubbish. The Stock Exchange did really support the government of Kolchak when it relied for support on the Constituent Assembly. From its experience of Kolchak the Stock Exchange became confirmed in its conviction that the mechanism of bourgeois democracy can be utilized in capitalist interests, and then thrown aside like a worn-out pair of puttees. It is quite possible that the Stock Exchange would again give a parliamentary loan on the guarantee of a Constituent Assembly, believing, on the basis of its former experience, that such a body would prove only an intermediate step to capitalist dictatorship. We do not propose to buy the "business faith" of the Stock Exchange at such a price, and decidedly prefer the "faith" which is aroused in the realist Stock Exchange by the weapon of the Red Army.
[4] (The History of the American War, by Fletcher, Lieut.-Colonel in the Scots Guards, St. Petersburg, 1867, page 95.)
[5] Fletcher's History of the American War, pages 162-164.
[6] It is not without interest to observe that in the Communal elections of 1871 in Paris there participated 230,000 electors. At the Town elections of November, 1917, in Petrograd, in spite of the boycott of the election on the part of all parties except ourselves and the Left Social Revolutionaries, who had no influence in the capital, there participated 390,000 electors. In Paris, in 1871, the population numbered two millions. In Petrograd, in November, 1917, there were not more than two millions. It must be noticed that our electoral system was infinitely more democratic. The Central Committee of the National Guard carried out the elections on the basis of the electoral law of the empire.
[7] Labor, Discipline, and Order will save the Socialist Soviet Republic (Moscow, 1918). Kautsky knows this pamphlet, as he quotes from it several times. This, however, does not prevent him passing over the passage quoted above, which makes clear the attitude of the Soviet Government to the intelligentsia.