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