the aim to
convert the majority and with its strength make the Revolution. Out of the
adult population of Russia at that time approximately 85 per cent. were
peasants and less than 5 per cent. belonged to the industrial proletariat.
At that time something like 70 per cent. of the people were illiterate.
Even in St. Petersburg--where the standard of literacy was higher than in
any other city--not more than 55 per cent. of the people could sign their
own names in 1905, according to the most authentic government reports. When
we contemplate such facts as these can we wonder that impatient
revolutionaries should shrink from attempting the task of converting a
majority of the population to an intelligent acceptance of Socialism?

There was another reason besides this, however. Lenine--and he personifies
Bolshevism--was, and is, a doctrinaire Marxist of the most dogmatic type
conceivable. As such he believed that the new social order must be the
creation of that class which is the peculiar product of modern capitalism,
the industrial proletariat. To that class alone he and his followers pinned
all their faith and hope, and that class was a small minority of the
population and bound to remain a minority for a very long period of years.
Here, then, we have the key. It cannot be too strongly stressed that the
Bolsheviki did not base their hope upon the working class of Russia, and
did not trust it. The working class of Russia--if we are to use the term
with an intelligent regard to realities--was and is mainly composed of
peasants; the industrial proletariat was and is only a relatively small
part of the great working class of the nation. _But it is upon that small
section, as against the rest of the working class, that Bolshevism relies_.

Lenine has always refused to include the peasants in his definition of the
working class. With almost fanatical intensity he has insisted that the
peasant, together with the petty manufacturer and trader, would soon
disappear; that industrial concentration would have its counterpart in a
great concentration of landownings and agriculture; that the small peasant
holdings would be swallowed up by large, modern agricultural estates, with
the result that there would be an immense mass of landless agricultural
wage-workers. This class would, of course, be a genuinely proletarian
class, and its interests would be identical with those of the industrial
proletariat. Until that time came it would be da