and democratic. Bruno Kreisky, who was to become the Social Democratic Chancellor of Austria from 1970 to 1983, spoke of a terrible verbal mistake: "[The] phrase 'dictatorship of the proletariat' stuck to the party like a brand. ... It was a dangerous formulation and contrary to everything that could be read in the program." Collapse of Austrian democracy Bauer, with the approval of Seitz and Renner, rejected coalition offers by the Christian Socialist Chancellors Ignaz Seipel in 1931 and Engelbert Dollfuss in 1932. It soon came to be considered a fatal mistake. Kreisky wrote, "In my opinion, it was the last chance to save Austrian democracy." On 4 March 1933 Bauer and Seitz sent party secretary Adolf Schärf to Karl Renner with the advice that he resign as first president of the National Council, due to what came to be known the rules of procedure crisis. Following the resignations on the same day of both the Christian Socialist second president and the Greater German People's Party third president, Chancellor Dollfuss two days later declared the elimination of Parliament and prevented it from reconvening. Although it was mandatory in the SDAP's party statutes for a general strike to be called if Parliament was not allowed to sit, no strike took place. Bauer did not allow himself to be pushed into action until the operational plans of the Republikanischer Schutzbund ('Republican Protection League') – the SDAP's paramilitary arm established in 1923 to counter the right-wing Heimwehr – were already in the hands of the Dollfuss government and it had cleared out a number of the Schutzbund's weapons caches. In early February 1934, Theodor Körner, who had been a general during World War I and was at the time Chairman of the Austrian Parliament's upper house, was asked at the last minute to take command of the Schutzbund. After examining the Schutzbund structure in six Viennese districts, he implored Bauer on 11 February not to let it come to a clash with the government and its forces under any circumstances. He thought that the Schutzbund and the SDAP would certainly lose. Exile (1934–1938) Brno In February 1934 a series of skirmishes known as the February Uprising broke out between Austrian government forces and the Schutzbund. It ended in a socialist defeat and the outlawing of the SDAP. On the second day of the four-day uprising, Bauer, Julius Deutsch and other members of the