ort. In November,
1917, when the Bolsheviki seized the government, one of their first acts
was to satisfy the peasant's land hunger by turning over to his use all
the land. The "proletariat" had then a free hand so far as the most
numerous class in Russia was concerned.

Just as the capitalist class reached the threshold of the revolution
psychologically below par, so the wage-earning class in developing the
will to rule outran all expectations and beat the Marxian time-schedule.
Among the important contributing factors was the unity of the industrial
laboring class, a unity broken by no rifts between highly paid skilled
groups and an inferior unskilled class, or between a well-organized
labor aristocracy and an unorganized helot class. The economic and
social oppression under the old regime had seen to it that no group of
laborers should possess a stake in the existing order or desire to
separate from the rest. Moreover, for several decades, and especially
since the memorable days of the revolution of 1905, the laboring class
has been filled by socialistic agitators and propagandists with ideas of
the great historical role of the proletariat. The writer remembers how
in 1905 even newspapers of the moderately liberal stamp used to speak of
the "heroic proletariat marching in the van of Russia's progress." No
wonder then that, when the revolution came, the industrial wage earners
had developed such self-confidence as a class that they were tempted to
disregard the dictum of their intellectual mentors that this was merely
to be a bourgeois revolution--with the social revolution still remote.
Instead they listened to the slogan "All power to the Soviets."

The idea of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" reached maturity in
the course of the abortive revolution of 1905-1906. After a victory for
the people in October, 1905, the bourgeoisie grew frightened over the
aggressiveness of the wage-earning class and sought safety in an
understanding with the autocracy. An order by the Soviet of Petrograd
workmen in November, 1905, decreeing the eight-hour day in all factories
sufficed to make the capitalists forego their historical role of
champions of popular liberty against autocracy. If the bourgeoisie
itself will not fight for a democracy, reasoned the revolutionary
socialists, why have such a democracy at all? Have we not seen the
democratic form of government lend itself to ill-concealed plutocracy in
Europe and America? Wh