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 dangerous 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 faith to a minority of that minority. They wanted to establish, not democracy, but dictatorship of Russia by a small, disciplined, intelligent, and determined minority of working-men.

The lines of cleavage between the Mensheviki and the Bolsheviki were thus clearly drawn. The former, while ready to join in mass uprisings and armed insurrections by the masses, believed that the supreme necessity was education and organization of all the working-people. Still relying upon the industrial proletariat to lead the struggle, they nevertheless recognized that the peasants were indispensable. The Bolsheviki, on the other hand, relied exclusively upon armed insurrection, initiated and directed by desperate minorities. The Mensheviki contended that the time for secret, conspiratory action was past; that Russia had outgrown that earlier method. As far as possible, they carried the struggle openly into the political field. They organized unions, educational societies, and co-operatives, confident that through these agencies the workers would develop cohesion and strength, which, at the right time, they would use as their class interests dictated. The Bolsheviki, on the other hand, clung to the old conspiratory methods, always mastered by the idea that a sudden coup must some day place the reins of power in the hands of a revolutionary minority of the workers and enable them to set up a dictatorship. That dictatorship, it must be understood, was not to be permanent; democracy, possibly even political democracy, would come later.

As we have already noted, into the ranks of the terrorist Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Bolsheviki spies and provocative agents wormed their way in large numbers. It is the inevitable fate of secret, conspiratory movements that this should be so, and also that it should result in saturating the minds of all engaged in the movements with distrust and suspicion. More than once the charge of being a provocateur was leveled at Lenine and at Trotzky, but without justification, apparently. There was, indeed, one incident which placed Lenine in a bad light. It belongs to a somewhat later period than we have been discussing, but it serves admirably to illustrate conditions which obtained throughout the whole dark period between the two great revolutions. One of Lenine's close friends and disciples was Roman Malinovsky, a fiery speaker of considerable power, distinguished for his bitter attacks upon the bourgeois progressive parties and upon the Mensheviki. The tenor of his speeches was always the same—only the interest of the proletariat should be considered; all bourgeois political parties and groups were equally reactionary, and any co-operation with them, for any purpose, was a betrayal of Socialist principle.

Malinovsky was trusted by the Bolsheviki. He was elected to the Fourth Duma, where he became the leader of the little group of thirteen Social Democrats. Like other members of the Bolshevik faction, he entered the Duma, despite his contempt for parliamentary action, simply because it afforded him a useful opportunity for agitation and demonstrations. In the Duma he assailed even a portion of the Social Democratic group as belonging to the bourgeoisie, succeeding in splitting it in two factions and becoming the leader of the Bolshevik faction, numbering six. This blatant demagogue, whom Lenine called "the Russian Bebel," was proposed for membership in the International Socialist Bureau, the supreme council of the International Socialist movement, and would have been sent as a delegate to that body as a representative of Russian Socialist movement but for the discovery of the fact that he was a secret agent of the Czar's government!

It was proved that Malinovsky was a provocateur in the pay of the Police Department, and that many, if not all, of his speeches had been prepared for him in the Police Department by a former director named Beletzky. The exposure made a great sensation in Russian Socialist circles at the time, and the fact that it was Nikolai Lenine who had proposed that Malinovsky be chosen to sit in the International Socialist Bureau naturally caused a great deal of unfriendly comment. It cannot be denied that the incident placed Lenine in an unfavorable light, but it must be admitted that nothing developed to suggest that he was guilty of anything more serious than permitting himself to be outwitted and deceived by a cunning trickster. The incident serves to show, however, the ease with which the extreme fanaticism of the Bolsheviki played into the hands of the autocracy.

VII

While Bolsheviki and Mensheviki wrangled and disputed, great forces were at work among the Russian people. By 1910 the terrible pall of depression and despair which had settled upon the nation as a result of the failure of the First Revolution began to break. There was a new generation of college students, youthful and optimistic spirits who were undeterred by the failure of 1905-06, confident that they were wiser and certain to succeed. Also there had been an enormous growth of working-class organizations, large numbers of unions and co-operative societies having been formed in spite of the efforts of the government. The soul of Russia was once more stirring.