Lenin ridicules and refutes those who say that the outrage of the masses and the development of the revolution were caused by some particular party, some particular individual, or, as they shout, the will of a dictator. "The fire of revolution was ignited solely by the incredible suffering of Russia and all the conditions created by the war, which sharply and decisively posed the question before the working people: either take a bold, desperate, and fearless step, or perish—die a hungry death.And then Lenin returns to the Soviets: "And the revolutionary fire manifested itself in the fact that the Soviets — the mainstay of the working revolution — were created. The Russian people made a giant leap — a leap from tsarism to the Soviets. The Soviets, fanning the flames of revolution, imperiously dictate to the people: 'Fight, take everything into your own hands, and organize yourselves....The Russian Revolution (February 1917 – my note), having overthrown tsarism, had to continue without stopping, not limiting itself to the triumph of the bourgeois revolution, because the war and the unprecedented disasters it had brought upon the exhausted peoples had created fertile ground for the outbreak of a social revolution. The Soviets stood their ground as organs of revolutionary action, as organs of revolutionary power. The entire history of the revolutionary struggle, especially the eight months after the February Revolution, is filled with precisely this struggle in the Soviets, which became the center that ensured the union of the working class and the peasantry, the union of all the peoples of the former tsarist prison of oppressed peoples and nations, and a powerful organ of power — the dictatorship of the proletariat....Democracy is one of the forms of the bourgeois state, which is supported by all the traitors of true socialism who now find themselves at the head of official socialism and who claim that democracy is contrary to the dictatorship of the proletariat. As long as the revolution did not go beyond the framework of the bourgeois system, we stood for democracy, but as soon as we saw the first glimmers of socialism in the whole course of the revolution, we took a position firmly and resolutely defending the dictatorship of the proletariat. Democracy, Lenin said, is formal parliamentarism, but in reality it is the uninterrupted cruel mockery, the unbearable oppression of the bourgeoisie over the working people....The CEC consisted of 300 Bolsheviks, 150 Left Socialist Revolutionaries, several United Internationalists, several anarchists, five Socialist Revolutionaries-Maximalists, and even five each from the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries-Center. This refutes the slander of the enemies that immediately after the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks removed all other parties from participation in the political life of the country. Only in the course of the struggle, when these parties showed themselves to be active enemies of the Soviet state, was the dictatorship of the proletariat forced to remove them from the path to ensure the victory of the new socialist state over its most vicious enemies—the White Guards and foreign imperialist interventionists.
