has come to pass. It would be equally easy to point to deeds
instead of words if we need more forcible though less
accurate illustrations.


Thus, at the time of the Moscow Congress the Soviets, then
Mensheviks, who were represented at the Congress (the
object of the Congress was to whip up support for the
Coalition Government) were against strikes of protest. The
Trades Unions took a point of view nearer that of
the Bolsheviks, and the strikes in Moscow took place in spite
of the Soviets. After the Kornilov affair, when the Mensheviks
were still struggling for coalition with the bourgeois parties, the
Trades Unions quite definitely took the Bolshevik standpoint.
At the so-called Democratic Conference, intended as a
sort of life belt for the sinking Provisional Government,
only eight of the Trades Union delegates voted for a
continuance of the coalition, whereas seventy three voted against.


This consciously revolutionary character throughout their
much shorter existence has distinguished Russian from, for
example, English Trades Unions. It has set their course for
them.



In October, 1917, they got the revolution for which they had
been asking since March. Since then, one Congress after