Next, as objectors to the dictatorship, come the social democrats, and in especial the mensheviks. These worthies have completely forgotten what they wrote about the matter in former days. In our old program, drawn up by ourselves and the mensheviks together, it is expressly stated: “An essential condition of the social revolution is the dictatorship of the proletariat, that is to say the conquest of political power by the proletariat, which will enable the workers to crush all resistance on the part of the exploiters.” The mensheviks signed this statement. But when the time came for action, they raised a clamour against the crushing of the freedom of the bourgeoisie, against the suppression of bourgeois newspapers, against the bolshevist “reign of terror,” and so on. Even Plekhanov, at one time, thoroughly approved of the most ruthless measures against the bourgeoisie, saying that we could deprive the bourgeois of their electoral rights, and so on. Nowadays the mensheviks have forgotten all this; they have taken refuge in the camp of the bourgeoisie.
Finally, a number of moral considerations are brought into the argument against us. We are told that we form our judgments like the