Historic conditions have made the Russians, perhaps for a short period, the leaders of the revolutionary world proletariat, but Socialism cannot now prevail in Russia. We can expect only an agrarian revolution, which will help to create more favorable conditions for further development of the proletarian forces and may result in measures for the control of production and distribution.
The main results of the present Revolution will have to be the creation of more favorable conditions for further revolutionary development, and to influence the more highly developed European countries into action.[12]
The Bolsheviki at this period had as their program the following:
(1) The Soviets of Workers, Soldiers, and Peasants to constitute themselves into the actual revolutionary government and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat; (2) immediate confiscation of landed estates without compensation, the seizure to be done by the peasants themselves, without waiting for legal forms or processes, the peasants to organize into Soviets; (3) measures for the control of production and distribution by the revolutionary government, nationalization of monopolies, repudiation of the national debt; (4) the workers to take possession of factories and operate them in co-operation with the technical staffs; (5) refusal by the Soviets to recognize any treaties made by the governments either of the Czar or the bourgeoisie, and the immediate publication of all such treaties; (6) the workers to propose at once and publicly an immediate truce and negotiations of peace, these to be carried on by the proletariat and not by and with the bourgeoisie; (7) bourgeois war debts to be paid exclusively by the capitalists.
According to Litvinov, who is certainly not an unfriendly authority, as soon as Lenine arrived in Russia he submitted a new program to his party which was so novel, and so far a departure from accepted Socialist principles, that "Lenine's own closest friends shrank from it and refused to accept it."[13]
This program involved the abandonment of the plans made for holding the Constituent Assembly, or, at any rate, such a radical change as to amount to the abandonment of the accepted plans. He proposed that universal, equal, direct, and secret suffrage be frankly abandoned, and that only the industrial proletariat and the poorest section of the peasantry be permitted to vote at all! Against the traditional Socialist view that class distinctions must be wiped out and the class war ended by the victorious proletariat, Lenine proposed to make the class division more rigid and enduring. He proposed to give the sole control of Russia into the hands of not more than two hundred thousand workers in a land of one hundred and eighty millions of people, more than one hundred and thirty-five millions of whom were peasants!
Of course, there could be no reconciliation between such views as these and the universally accepted Socialist principle of democratic government. Lenine did not hesitate to declare that democracy itself was a "bourgeois conception" which the revolutionary proletariat must overthrow, a declaration hard to reconcile with his demand for a "democratic republic." Russia must not become a democratic republic, he argued, for a democratic republic is a bourgeois republic. Again and again, during the time we are discussing and later, Lenine assailed the principle of democratic government. "Since March, 1917, the word 'democracy' is simply a shackle fastened upon the revolutionary nation," he declared in an article written after the Bolsheviki had overthrown Kerensky.[14]
When democracy is abolished, parliamentary government goes with it. From the first days after his return to Russia Lenine advocated, instead of a parliamentary republic similar to that of France or the United States, what he called a Soviet republic, which would be formed upon these lines: local government would be carried on by local Soviets composed of delegates elected by "the working class and the poorest peasantry," to use a common Bolshevik phrase which bothers a great many people whose minds insist upon classifying peasants as "working-people" and part of the working class. What Lenine means when he uses the phrase, and what Litvinov means[15] is that the industrial wage-workers—to whom is applied the term "working class"—must be sharply distinguished from peasants and small farmers, though the very poorest peasants, not being conservative, as more prosperous peasants are, can be united with the wage-workers.
These local Soviets functioning in local government would, in Lenine's Soviet republic, elect delegates to a central committee of all the Soviets in the country, and that central committee would be the state. Except in details of organization, this is not materially different from the fundamental idea of the I.W.W. with which we are familiar.[16] According to the latter, the labor-unions, organized on industrial lines and federated through a central council, will take the place of parliamentary government elected on territorial lines. According to the Bolshevik plan, Soviets would take the place held by the unions in the plan of the I.W.W. It is not to be wondered at that, in the words of Litvinov, Lenine's own closest friends shrank from his scheme and Lenine "was compelled to drop it for a time."