ngerous to rely upon the
peasants, he urged, because their instincts are bourgeois rather than
proletarian. Naturally, he has looked askance at the peasant Socialist
movements, denying that they were truly Socialist at all. They could not be
Socialist movements in the true sense, he contended, because they lacked
the essential quality of true Socialists, namely, proletarian class
consciousness.

Naturally, too, Lenine and his followers have always regarded movements
which aimed to divide the land among the peasants, and so tend to give
permanence to a class of petty agriculturists, as essentially reactionary.
The exigencies of the struggle have forced them into some compromises, of
course. For example, at first they were not willing to admit that the
peasants could be admitted into their group at all, but later on they
admitted some who belonged to the poorest class of peasants. Throughout,
however, they have insisted that the peasant class as a whole was a class
of petty bourgeoisie and that its instincts and interests would inevitably
lead it to side with the bourgeoisie as against the proletariat. Of course,
this is a very familiar phase of Socialist evolution in every country. It
lasted in Germany many years. In Russia, however, the question assumed an
importance it never had in any other country, owing to the vast
preponderance of peasants in the population. Anything more un-Russian than
this theorizing cannot be well conceived. It runs counter to every fact in
Russian experience, to the very basis of her economic life at this stage of
her history. Lenine is a Russian, but his dogmas are not Russian, but
German. Bolshevism is the product of perverted German scholasticism.

Even the industrial workers as a whole, in their present stage of
development, were not to be trusted, according to the Bolshevist leaders.
They frankly opposed the Mensheviki when the latter proposed to hold their
great convention of industrial workers, giving as their reason the fear
that the convention majority would not consist of class-conscious
revolutionary Marxian Socialists. In other words, they feared that the
majority would not be on their side, and they had not the time or the
patience to convert them. There was no pretense of faith in the majority of
the industrial proletariat, much less of faith in the entire working class
of Russia. The industrial proletariat was a minority of the working class,
and the Bolsheviki pinned their fait