Because the Bolsheviki and the Anarchists both oppose parliamentary
government and the political state, it has been concluded by many writers
on the subject that Bolshevism is simply Anarchism in another guise. This
is a mistake. Bolshevism is quite different from and opposed to Anarchism.
It requires strongly centralized government, which Anarchism abhors.

Parliamentary government cannot exist except upon the basis of the will of
the majority. Whoever enters into the parliamentary struggle, therefore,
must hope and aim to convert the majority. Back of that hope and aim must
be faith in the intellectual and moral capacity of the majority. At the
foundation of Bolshevist theory and practice lies the important fact that
there is no such faith, and, consequently, neither the hope nor 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.