Leon Trotsky,
Results and Prospects — Preface
(1921)
“ Always and everywhere the Mensheviks strove to find signs of the development of bourgeois democracy, and where they could not find them they invented them. They exaggerated the importance of every ‘democratic’ declaration and demonstration, at the same time belittling the forces of the proletariat and the prospects before its struggle. ”
Leon Trotsky,
Results and Prospects — Preface
(1921)
“ Petty-bourgeois democracy without any Socialist ideology, without any Marxian class preparation, could not, of course, have acted differently under the conditions of the Russian Revolution, than did the Mensheviks in the role of the ‘leading’ Party of the February Revolution. The absence of any serious social foundation for bourgeois democracy told on the Mensheviks themselves, because they very soon outlived themselves, and in the eighth month of the Revolution were thrown aside by the class struggle. ”
Leon Trotsky,
Results and Prospects — Preface
(1921)
“ Kautsky understood then that, once having seized revolutionary power, the proletariat would not make the fate of the revolution depend upon the passing moods of the least conscious, not yet awakened masses at any given moment, but that, on the contrary, it would turn the political power concentrated in its hands into a mighty apparatus for the enlightenment and organization of these same backward and ignorant peasant masses. ”
