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

EXTRAORDINARY ALL-RUSSIA RAILWAYMEN’S CONGRESS491ine, the danger of extinction, the physical destruction ofmillions of people. From April 20 on, when the woundedLinde marched his soldiers out into a street in Petrograd tooverthrow the government of Milyukov and Guch1sov,through the long period of ministerial leapfrogging, when allthe parties kowtowed the Constitutional-Democrats and viedwith each other in displaying loud and alluring programmes,the people saw for themselves that it was no use at all:they had been promised peace, but were in fact driven intoan offensive. In June 1917, tens of thousands of soldiers diedbecause of this secret treaty between the tsar and the Europeanimperialists, which Kerensky honoured. It was not propagandabut this first-hand experience that helped the peopleto make a comparison between the socialist power of theSoviets and the bourgeois republic. They carried away theconviction that there was nothing in the old reforms and theold institutions of bourgeois imperialism for the workingand exploited people, and that only the power of the Sovietswas good enough for them. The people—and this includesworkers, soldiers, peasants and railwaymen, in fact, allworking people—are free to elect their own deputies to theSoviets and are free to recall them when they do not satisfythe people’s demands and wishes. You don’t sit in a Sovietto interpret laws or make brilliant parliamentary speechesbut to implement the freedoms and throw off the yoke ofexploitation. The workers, on their own, will build theirstate on new lines; they will build a new life in the newRussia without any room for exploiters. That is what producedthe Soviets, and that is why we say that the experienceof the Russian revolution showed the people and wentto confirm something we had said long ago, namely, thatSoviet power is a much higher form of democracy than anybourgeois republic that has taken shape in Western Europe;in a real democracy, the working classes can and mustcontrol the non-working elements, the exploiting section ofsociety; workers, soldiers, peasants and railwaymen can betheir own masters; they can arrange an exchange of goodsbetween towns and villages, and set a fair wage, withoutthe capitalists and landowners.That is why the Soviet Republic in Russia has now takenthe shape of a fully socialist republic which has taken