"
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.
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