Petrograd, Jan 24. The third All-Russian Congress of Workmen’s and Peasants’ delegates opened here yesterday. Addressing the foreign delegates, M Trotsky said: “Many efforts and much energy are needed to conquer the capitalist hegemony of Europe, where capital has dominated for generations not only the bourgeois class but that of the workmen also. As regards the struggle against the ancient systems of Europe and America, we have no need to be pessimistic. Our foreign comrades are the precursors of a general and invincible revolt. The movement is slow but sure.
“The delegates coming from the countries of the old time Parliamentarism make no protest against the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly. Universal suffrage is out of date. The dictatorship of the proletariat alone will save the country.”
M Lenin, speaking at the Congress of Soviets today, said all Socialists recognized that there must be a transition period between capitalism and Socialism. This transition period was a dictatorship, and proletariat and Soviet authority entered by the road of that dictatorship.
“We stand [he said] for class violence against other classes, and we are unperturbed by the wails of those who are disconcerted by the sight of this violence. It is mere prejudice to think that the simple workman and the simple peasant cannot rule the country.”
The Commissioner of Justice, in an interview, said the imprisoned members of the late Provisional Government would not be brought to trial. They were imprisoned because they constituted a kind of political symbol around which the elements which were discontented with the present Government might collect. They would be released as soon as the existing authority was consolidated. “Our chief enemies,” he said, “are not the Cadets. Our most irreconcilable opponents are the Moderate Socialists. This explains the arrests of Socialists and the closing down of Socialist newspapers. Such measures of repression, however, are temporary. As soon as the acuteness of the moment has passed all the arrested persons can be released. This applies also to the arrested members of the Union for the Defence of the Constituent Assembly.”