themselves Socialists, and considering themselves such, the
intellectuals were filled with an ill-disguised respect for the
political power of the liberal bourgeoisie, towards their knowledge and
methods. To this was due the effort of the petty bourgeois leaders to
secure, at any cost, a cooperation, union, or coalition with the liberal
bourgeoisie. The programme of the Social-Revolutionists--created wholly
out of nebulous humanitarian formulas, substituting sentimental
generalizations and moralistic superstructures for a class-conscious
attitude, proved to be the thing best adapted for a spiritual vestment
of this type of leaders. Their efforts in one way or another to prop up
their spiritual and political helplessness by the science and politics
of the bourgeoisie which so overawed them, found its theoretical
justification in the teachings of the Mensheviki, who explained that the
present revolution was a bourgeois revolution, and therefore could not
succeed without the participation of the bourgeoisie in the government.
In this way, the natural bloc of Social-Revolutionists and Mensheviki
was created, which gave simultaneous expression to the political
lukewarmness of the middle-class intellectuals and its relation of
vassal to imperialistic liberalism.

It was perfectly clear to us that the logic of the class struggle would,
sooner or later, destroy this temporary combination and cast aside the
leaders of the transition period. The hegemony of the petty bourgeois
intellectuals meant, in reality, that the peasantry, which had suddenly
been called, through the agency of the military machine, to an organized
participation in political life, had, by mere weight of numbers,
overshadowed the working class and temporarily dislodged it. More than
this: To the extent that the middle-class leaders had suddenly been
lifted to terrific heights by the mere bulk of the army, the proletariat
itself, and its advanced minority, had been discounted, and could not