eths,
prejudices, dogmas, and theories to Russia's necessity. The sanity of this
opportunistic attitude is altogether admirable, but it contrasts strangely
with the refusal to co-operate with the bourgeoisie in establishing a
stable democratic government--no less necessary for Russia's reconstruction
and for Socialism. As a matter of fact, the very promptitude and sanity of
their opportunism when faced by responsibility, serves to demonstrate the
truth of the contention made in these pages, that in refusing to co-operate
with others in building up a permanently secure democratic government,
they were actuated by no high moral principle, but simply by a desire to
gain power. The position of Russia to-day would have been vastly different
if the wisdom manifested in the following paragraphs had governed Lenine
and his associates in the days when Kerensky was trying to save Russian
democracy:

_Without the direction of specialists of different branches of
knowledge, technique, and experience, the transformation toward
Socialism is impossible_, for Socialism demands a conscious mass
movement toward a higher productivity of labor in comparison with
capitalism and on the basis which had been attained by capitalism.
Socialism must accomplish this movement forward in its own way, by
its own methods--to make it more definite, by Soviet methods. But
the specialists are inevitably bourgeois on account of the whole
environment of social life which made them specialists.... In view
of the considerable delay in accounting and control in general,
although we have succeeded in defeating sabotage, we have _not
yet_ created an environment which would put at our disposal the
bourgeois specialists. Many sabotagers are coming into our
service, but the best organizers and the biggest specialists can
be used by the state either in the old bourgeois way (that is, for
a higher salary) or in the new proletarian way (that is, by
creating such an environment of universal accounting and control
which would inevitably and naturally attract and gain the
submission of specialists). We were forced now to make use of the
old bourgeois method and agree to a very high remuneration for the
services of the biggest of the bourgeois specialists. All those
who are acquainted with the facts understand this, but not all
give sufficient thought to the significance of such a