This program is perfectly clear.
To establish revolutionary coöperation with the army, the peasantry, and the plebeian lower strata of the urban bourgeoisie. To abolish absolutism. To destroy the material organization of absolutism by reconstructing and partly dismissing the army. To break up the entire bureaucratic apparatus. To introduce an eight hour workday. To arm the population, starting with the proletariat. To turn the Soviets into organs of revolutionary self-government in the cities. To create Councils of Peasants' Delegates (Peasants' Committees) as local organs of the agrarian revolution. To organize elections to the Constituent Assembly and to conduct a preëlection campaign for a definite program on the part of the representatives of the people.
It is easier to formulate such a program than to carry it through. If, however, the revolution will ever win, the proletariat cannot choose another. The proletariat will unfold revolutionary accomplishment such as the world has never seen. The history of Fifty Days will be only a poor page in the great book of the proletariat's struggle and ultimate triumph.
PREFACE TO MY ROUND TRIP
Trotzky was never personal. The emotional side of life seldom appears in his writings. His is the realm of social activities, social and political struggles. His writings breathe logic, not sentiment, facts, not poetry. The following preface to his Round Trip is, perhaps, the only exception. It speaks of the man Trotzky and his beliefs. Note his confession of faith: "History is a tremendous mechanism serving our ideals." ...
At the Stockholm Convention of the Social-Democratic Party, some curious statistical data was circulated, showing the conditions under which the party of the proletariat was working:
The Convention as a whole, in the person of its 140 members, had spent in prison one hundred and thirty-eight years and three and a half months.