Published:
Pravda No. 37, May 4 (April 21), 1917.
Published according to the text in Pravda.
Source:
Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
1964,
Moscow,
Volume 24,
pages 184-185.
Translated: Isaacs Bernard
Transcription\Markup:
B. Baggins and D. Walters
Public Domain:
Lenin Internet Archive
1999
(2005).
You may freely copy, distribute,
display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and
commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet
Archive” as your source.
• README
The Provisional Government’s Note has fully demonstrated the correctness of the position which our Party adopted in the resolution of the Petrograd City Conference, namely, (1) that the Provisional Governmentis an out-and-out imperialist government bound hand and foot by Anglo-French and Russian capital; (2) that all the promises it has made or may make (as to “ascertaining the will of the people for peace”, etc.) are nothing but deceit; (3) that the Provisional Government, irrespective of its composition,cannot renounce annexations, because in this war, and especially at this moment, the capitalist class is tied by banking capital; (4) that the policy of the petty bourgeoisie pursued by the Narodniks, Mensheviks and most of the leaders of the present Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, a policy of encouraging false hopes as to the possibility of “improving” the capitalists (i.e., the Provisional Government) by “corrective measures”, has once again been exposed by this Note.
In view of this, the Central Committee finds:
1) that any change in the composition of the present government (the resignation of Milyukov, the recall of Kerensky, etc.) would only be imitating the worst methods of bourgeois parliamentary republicanism, which substitutes for the struggle of classes the rivalry of cliques and the reshuffling of individuals;
2) that the only means of salvation for the mass of the petty-bourgeois population, which vacillates between the capitalists and the working class, is to unreservedly join the revolutionary proletariat, which is the only class capable of really breaking the fetters of finance capital and the policy of annexation. Only by taking—with the support of the majority of the people—the whole power of state into its own hands, will the revolutionary proletariat, together with the revolutionary soldiers, create, in the shape of the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, a government which will be trusted by the workers of all countries and which will alone be capable of quickly putting an end to the war by means of a truly democratic peace.
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