Lenin CW-Vol. 23.pdf - From Marx to Mao

LETTERS FROM AFAR309LETTERS FROM AFARS E C O N D L E T T E RTHE NEW GOVERNMENT AND THE PROLETARIATThe principal document I have at my disposal at today’sdated (March 8/21) is a copy of that most conservative andbourgeois English newspaper The Times of March 16, containinga batch of reports about the revolution in Russia. Clearly,a source more favourably inclined—to put it mildly—towards the Guchkov and Milyukov government it wouldnot be easy to find.This newspaper’s correspondent reports from St. Petersburgon Wednesday, March 1 (14), when the first Provisional(government still existed, i.e., the thirteen-member DumaExecutive Committee, 132 headed by Rodzyanko and includingtwo “socialists”, as the newspaper puts it, Kerenskyand Chkheidze:“A group of 22 elected members of the Upper House [StateCouncil] including M. Guchkov, M. Stakhovich, PrinceTrubetskoi, and Professor Vassiliev, Grimm, and Vernadsky,yesterday addressed a telegram to the Tsar” imploring him inorder to save the “dynasty”, etc., etc., to convoke the Dumaand to name as the head of the government some one whoenjoys the “confidence of the nation”. “What the Emperormay decide to do on his arrival today is unknown at the hourof telegraphing,” writes the correspondent, “but one thingis quite certain. Unless His Majesty immediately complieswith the wishes of the most moderate elements among hisloyal subjects, the influence at present exercised by theProvisional Committee of the Imperial Duma will passwholesale into the hands of the socialists, who want to see arepublic established, but who are unable to institute any kind