Collected Works of V. I. Lenin - Vol. 26 - From Marx to Mao

490V. I. LENINthe revolution—April 1917—that the Soviets were a muchhigher, a very much more perfect and purposeful form ofdemocracy—a working people’s democracy—than the ConstituentAssembly.* The Constituent Assembly unites allclasses, which means also the exploiter classes, the propertiedclasses, hence, the bourgeoisie and those who receivedtheir education at the expense of the people, at the expenseof the exploited, and abandoned the people to join the capitalists,turning their knowledge, the greatest achievementsof knowledge, into a tool for oppressing the people, andfighting the working classes. For our part we declare thatwhen a revolution of the working and exploited classesbreaks out, all power in the state goes to their organisation.This form of democracy is incomparably higher than theold one. No party invented the Soviets. You know verywell that no party could have invented them. They werebrought to life by the 1905 revolution. And although at thattime the Soviets were short-lived, it was clear that theywere the people’s only reliable bulwark in the struggleagainst the autocracy. Whenever the Soviets declined andgave way to some national representative institutions—asall these Dumas, congresses and assemblies have shown—theConstitutional-Democrats, the capitalists and exploiterscame to the fore, deals were made with the tsar, the organsof the people’s movement declined and the revolution collapsed.That is why when the 1917 Revolution did not merelyrevive the Soviets but extended a network of them acrossthe country, they taught the workers, soldiers and peasantsthat they could and should take all state power into theirown hands, not as in bourgeois parliaments, where everycitizen has the same rights as the next man. Life will notbe sweeter for the poor if the worker proclaims that he isthe equal of Ryabushinsky, and the peasant the equal of aman who owns 12,000 dessiatines of land. That is why thebest form of democracy, the best democratic republic is powerwithout the landowners and the rich.The Russian people gained a great deal of experiencemuch faster and came to a decision in a matter of monthsbecause of the war. the unprecedented dislocation, the fam-* See present edition, Vol. 24, pp. 21-26.—Ed.