V. I.

Lenin

“ Drive nature out of the door and she will rush back through the
window.” It seems that the Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik
parties have to “learn” this simple truth time and again by
their own experience. They under took to be "revolutionary
democrats" and found themselves in the shoes of revolutionary
democrats—they are now forced to draw the conclusions which every revolutionary democrat must draw.

Democracy is the rule of the majority. As long as the will of
the majority was not clear, as long as it was possible to make
it out to be unclear, at least with a grain of plausibility, the
people were offered a counter-revolutionary bourgeois government
disguised as "democratic." But this delay could not last
long. During the several months that have passed since February
27 the will of the majority of the workers and peasants, of the
overwhelming majority of the country’s population, has become
clear in more than a general sense. Their will has found
expression in mass organisations—the Soviet’s of
Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies.

How, then, can anyone oppose the transfer of all power in the
state to the Soviets? Such opposition means nothing but
renouncing democracy! It means no more no less than imposing on
the people a government which admittedly can neither come into being nor hold its ground democratically ,
i.e., as a result of truly free, truly popular elections.

It is a face, strange as it may seem at first sight, that the
Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks have forgotten
this perfectly simple, perfectly obvious and palpable truth.

Their position is so false, and they are so badly confused and bewildered, that they are unable to “recover” this
truth they have lost. Following the elections in Petrograd and
in Moscow, the convocation of the All-Russia Peasant Congress,
and the Congress of Soviets, the classes and parties throughout
Russia have shown what they stand for so clearly and specifically that people who have not gone mad or deliberately
got themselves into a mess and simply cannot have any illusions
on this score.

To tolerate the Cadet Ministers or the Cadet government or Cadet
policies means challenging democrats and democracy. This is the
source of the political crises since February 27, and this also
the source of the shakiness and vacillation of our government
system. At every turn, daily and even hourly, appeals are being
made to the people’s revolutionary spirit and to their democracy
on behalf of the most authoritative government institutions and
congresses. Yet the government’s policies in particular, are all
departures from revolutionary principles, and breaches in
democracy.

This sort of thing will not do.

It is inevitable that a situation like the present should show
elements of instability now for one reason, now for another. And
it is not exactly a clever policy of jib. Things are moving by
fits and starts towards a point where power will be transferred
to the Soviets, which is what our Party called for long ago.