The socialist character of Soviet democracy – that is, proletarian democracy, in its concrete, given application – consists, firstly, in the fact that the electors are the working and exploited masses, the bourgeoisie being excluded; secondly, in the fact that all bureaucratic formalities and restrictions on elections are abolished, the masses themselves determine the procedure and time of elections, with complete freedom to recall the elected; thirdly, in the fact that the best mass organisation of the vanguard of the working people, the large-scale industrial proletariat, is created, enabling it to lead the broadest masses of the exploited, to draw them into independent political life, to educate them politically through their own experience, so that for the first time a beginning is made for the entire population really to learn to administer and to begin to administer.

Such are the principal distinguishing features of the democracy that has been introduced in Russia and which represents a higher type of democracy, a break with the bourgeois distortion of it, a transition to socialist democracy and to conditions making it possible for the state to begin to wither away.

Naturally, the element of petty-bourgeois disorganisation (which is bound to manifest itself in one form or another in every proletarian revolution, and which in our revolution, owing to the petty-bourgeois character of the country, its backwardness and the consequences of the reactionary war, is particularly strongly manifested) cannot but leave its imprint upon the Soviets as well.

We must work unremittingly to develop the organisation of the Soviets and Soviet power. There is a petty-bourgeois tendency to turn the members of the Soviets into “parliamentarians” or, on the other hand, into bureaucrats. This must be combated by drawing all members of the Soviets into practical participation in administration. In many places the departments of the Soviets are being transformed into bodies that are gradually merging with the commissariats. Our aim is to draw the whole of the poor into the practical work of administration, and every step in this direction – the more varied, the better – must be carefully recorded, studied, systematised, tested by wider experience and given legal form. Our aim is that every working person, after completing an 8-hour “lesson” of productive labour, should perform state duties without pay: the transition to this is particularly difficult, but only this transition guarantees the final consolidation of socialism. The novelty and difficulty of the change naturally lead to an abundance of steps taken, so to speak, by groping, an abundance of mistakes and vacillations – without this there can be no sharp forward movement. The whole originality of the present situation, from the point of view of many who wish to regard themselves as socialists, is that people have grown accustomed to abstractly counterposing capitalism to socialism, and between the two they profoundly inserted the word: “leap” (some, recalling fragments of what they read in Engels, added with even greater profundity: “the leap from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom”{74}). Most of the so-called socialists, who have “read about” socialism in textbooks but never seriously delved into the matter, are incapable of thinking that the teachers of socialism called “leap” a turning point from the angle of the world historical turning points, and that such leaps extend over periods of ten or even more years. Naturally, in such times the notorious “intelligentsia” supplies an endless number of mourners over the dead: one wails over the Constituent Assembly, another over bourgeois discipline, a third over the capitalist order, a fourth over the cultured landowner, a fifth over imperialist great-power chauvinism, and so on and so forth.

The real interest of the epoch of great leaps is that the abundance of fragments of the old, sometimes accumulating faster than the number of embryos (not always immediately visible) of the new, demands the ability to single out what is most essential in the line or chain of development. There are historical moments when what is most important for the success of the revolution is to accumulate as many fragments as possible, i.e., to blow up as many old institutions as possible; there are moments when enough has been blown up and the “prosaic” (for the petty-bourgeois revolutionary “boring”) work of clearing the ground of the fragments comes to the fore; there are moments when the painstaking care of the embryos of the new, growing from under the fragments on ground still badly cleared of rubble, is most important.

It is not enough to be a revolutionary and an adherent of socialism or a Communist in general. One must be able at each particular moment to find the particular link in the chain which one must grasp with all one’s might, in order to hold the whole chain and prepare firmly for the transition to the next link, bearing in mind that the order of the links, their form, their cohesion, their distinction from one another in the historical chain of events are not as simple and not as stupid as in an ordinary chain made by a blacksmith.

The struggle against the bureaucratic distortion of the Soviet organisation is ensured by the firmness of the connection of the Soviets with the “people”, in the sense of the working and exploited people, and by the flexibility and elasticity of this connection. The poor never regard bourgeois parliaments, even in the capitalist republic most democratic in the world, as “their own” institution. But the Soviets are “their own” and not something alien for the mass of workers and peasants. The present-day “Social-Democrats” of the Scheidemann or, which is almost the same thing, Martov shade, are repelled by the Soviets, just as they are attracted to the decorous bourgeois parliament, or the Constituent Assembly, in the same way as Turgenev was attracted sixty years ago to a moderate monarchist and noble constitution, just as he was repelled by the muzhik democratism of Dobrolyubov and Chernyshevsky{75}.

It is precisely the closeness of the Soviets to the “people” of the working people that creates special forms of recall and other control from below, which must now be developed with particular zeal. For example, the Soviets of Public Education, as periodical conferences of Soviet electors and their delegates to discuss and control the activities of the Soviet authorities in the given sphere, deserve every sympathy and support. Nothing can be sillier than to transform the Soviets into something congealed and self-contained. The more resolutely we must now stand for mercilessly firm power, for the dictatorship of individuals for definite processes of work, at definite moments of purely executive functions, the more varied must be the forms and methods of control from below, in order to paralyse every shadow of a possibility of distortion of Soviet power, in order repeatedly and tirelessly to root out the weeds of bureaucracy.