classes.

To students of the social sciences, it is self-evident that the
prolonged rule of the proletariat in Russia in defiance of nearly the
whole world must be regarded as a product of Russian life, past and
present. In fact, the continued Bolshevist rule seems to be an index of
the relative fighting strength of the several classes in Russian
society--the industrial proletariat, the landed and industrial
propertied class, and the peasantry.

It is an irony of fate that the same revolution which purports to enact
into life the Marxian social program should belie the truth of Marx's
materialistic interpretation of history and demonstrate that history is
shaped by both economic and non-economic forces. Marx, as is well known,
taught that history is a struggle between classes, in which the landed
aristocracy, the capitalist class, and the wage earning class are raised
successively to rulership as, with the progress of society's technical
equipment, first one and then another class can operate it with the
maximum efficiency. Marx assumed that when the time has arrived for a
given economic class to take the helm, that class will be found in full
possession of all the psychological attributes of a ruling class,
namely, an indomitable will to power, no less than the more vulgar
desire for the emoluments that come with power. Apparently, Marx took
for granted that economic evolution is inevitably accompanied by a
corresponding development of an effective will to power in the class
destined to rule. Yet, whatever may be the case in the countries of the
West, in Russia the ruling classes, the gentry and the capitalists,
clearly failed in the psychological test at the critical time. This
failure is amply attested by the manner in which they submitted
practically without a fight after the Bolshevist coup _d'etat_.

To get at the secret of this apparent feebleness and want of spunk in
Russia's ruling class one must study a peculiarity of her history,
namely, the complete dominance of Russia's development by organized
government. Where the historian of the Western countries must take
account of several independent forces, each standing for a social class,
the Russian historian may well afford to station himself on the high
peak of government and, from this point of vantage, survey the hills and
vales of the society which it so thoroughly dominated.

Apolitism runs like a red thread through the pages of Russian history.
Even th