must the Soviet Power act thus openly? Because the Soviet Power really is the power of the working masses, the power of the majority of the population. It has no occasion to conceal that it was born in working-class quarters. Far from it, for the more conspicuously the Soviet Power insists upon its origin and its meaning, the closer will be the ties between itself and the masses, and the more outstanding will be its success in the struggle against the exploiters.
Of course this state of affairs will not last forever. The essence of the matter lies herein, that it is necessary to crush the resistance of the exploiters. But as soon as the exploiters have been repressed, bridled, and tamed, as soon as they have been trained to work and have become workers like everyone else, the pressure upon them will be relaxed and the dictatorship of the proletariat will gradually disappear.
This is expressly stipulated in our constitution (Part II, Chapter 5): “The fundamental task of the constitution of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic — a constitution adapted to the needs of the present period of transition — consists in the establishment of the dictatorship of the urban and rural workers and of the poor peasants in the form of a strong All-Russian Soviet Power, whose purpose it will be to effect the complete crushing of the bourgeoisie, to put an end to the exploitation of one human being by another, and to realise socialism, in which there will be neither division into classes nor any State authority.”
From this we may deduce the tasks of our party. The party must systematically expose the bourgeois fraud, which is worked as follows. Certain rights are conceded to the worker, but he is left in material dependence upon a master. Consequently the task of our party is to crush the exploiters by all the means at the disposal of the proletariat. Furthermore, it will be incumbent upon our party, in proportion as it is able to crush the exploiters and their hangers-on, in proportion as it is able to refashion them, by degrees to mitigate and to revoke the measures