"[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.
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