t strikes
of protest. The Trades Unions took a point of view nearer that of
the Bolsheviks, and the strikes in Moscow took place in spite of the
Soviets. After the Kornilov affair, when the Mensheviks were still
struggling for coalition with the bourgeois parties, the Trades Unions
quite definitely took the Bolshevik standpoint. At the so-called
Democratic Conference, intended as a sort of life belt for the sinking
Provisional Government, only eight of the Trades Union delegates voted
for a continuance of the coalition, whereas seventy three voted against.

This consciously revolutionary character throughout their much shorter
existence has distinguished Russian from, for example, English Trades
Unions. It has set their course for them.

In October, 1917, they got the revolution for which they had been asking
since March. Since then, one Congress after another has illustrated
the natural and inevitable development of Trades Unions inside a
revolutionary State which, like most if not all revolutionary States, is
attacked simultaneously by hostile armies from without and by economic
paralysis from within. The excited and lighthearted Trades Unionists
of three years ago, who believed that the mere decreeing of "workers'
control" would bring all difficulties automatically to an end, are now
unrecognizable. We have seen illusion after illusion scraped from them
by the pumice-stone of experience, while the appalling state of the
industries which they now largely control, and the ruin of the country
in which they attained that control, have forced them to alter their
immediate aims to meet immediate dangers, and have accelerated the
process of adaptation made inevitable by their victory.

The process of adaptation has had the natural result of producing new
internal cleavages. Change after change in their programme and theory
of the Russian Trades Unionists has been due to the pressure of life
itself, to the urgency of struggling against the worsening of conditions
already almost unbearable. It is perfectly natural that those Unions
which hold back from adaptation and resent the changes are precisely
those which, like that of the printers, are not intimately concerned in
any productive process, are consequently outside the central struggle,
and, while feeling the discomforts of change, do not feel its need.

The opposition inside the productive Trades Unions is of two kinds.
There is the opposition, which is of mere