It has not. Dual power still remains. The basic question of every revolution, that of state power, is still in an uncertain, unstable, and obviously transitory state.

The report made in Petrograd recently by a delegation of Donets workers exposed the Donets coal mine owners, who are criminally disrupting and stopping production, and (for the sake of safeguarding their “sacred” right to enormous profits) are condemning the workers to unemployment, the country to starvation, and industry to a crisis through a coal shortage.

"Annexation means keeping an alien people by force within the bounds of a given state." Pravda No. 60, May 31 (18), 1917.

The editors of Izvestia, a paper controlled by the Narodnik and Menshevik bloc, are beating all records of muddledom. In that paper’s issue No.67 for May 16, they try to chop logic with Pravda, without, of course, mentioning its name—a usual ill-mannered “ministerial” practice. Pravda, we are told, has a foggy, misleading idea of annexations.

"The Narodnik and Menshevik ministerialists are spouting phrases about “democracy” in the abstract, about “Revolution” in the abstract in order to cover up their agreement with the imperialist, now definitely counter-revolutionary, bourgeoisie of their own country"

''The most useful and indispensable job for the people at this moment of impending catastrophe is that of organisation.''

Published in Pravda No. 58 and 59, May 29 and 30 (16 and 17), 1917.

Nikolai Markin was born in 1892 into a very poor family; when young his parents had been textile workers in one of the factories in Penza province but they subsequently moved to Vladikavkaz (now renamed Orjonikidze).
Nikolai's childhood was spent in harsh conditions and hardly having learnt to read and write he was forced out to work so as not to burden his parents for whom every piece of bread cost dear.

"For Dzerzhinsky the security of the revolution was the supreme law, and so he could find in his heart that unshakeable rigour without which a victorious struggle against counter-revolution would have been quite impossible."

Published: Pravda No. 54, May 24 (11), 1917.

'What do you take the class-conscious workers and soldiers for? Or do you really regard them as “rebellious slaves”?'

Published in Pravda No. 53, May 23 (10), 1917.

'Soldiers and workers! You are told that you are defending “freedom” and the “revolution”! In reality you are defending the shady treaties of the tsar, which are concealed from you as one conceals a secret disease.'

We republish here Trotsky's speech on the occasion of Mikhail Frunze's death. It was published in lzvestlya on November 13, 1925. Trotsky was at the time the subject of a virulent witch hunt by the rising Stalinist bureaucracy. He had been forced to vacate his post as Commissar of War to Frunze, the choice of the Zinoviev-Kamenev-Stalin triumvirate. Frunze was politically close to Zinoviev, but Trotsky still pays tribute to the genuine Bolshevik qualities embodied by Frunze.