It is easy to understand the distrust of the Bolsheviki by the Socialist
parties and groups which represented the peasants. The latter class
constituted more than 85 per cent. of the population. Moreover, it had
furnished the great majority of the fighters in the revolutionary movement.
Its leaders and spokesmen resented the idea that they were to be dictated
to and controlled by a minority, which was, as Lenine himself admitted, not
materially more numerous than the old ruling class of landowners had been.
They wanted a democratic governmental system, free from class rule, while
the Bolsheviki wanted class rule. Generalizations are proverbially
perilous, and should be very cautiously made and applied to great currents
of thought and of life. But in a broad sense we may fairly say that the
Socialism of the Socialist-Revolutionists and the Mensheviki, the Socialism
of Kerensky and the men who were the majority of the Constituent Assembly,
was the product of Russian life and Russian economic development, while the
Socialism that the Bolsheviki tried by force of arms to impose upon Russia
was as un-Russian as it could be. The Bolshevist conception of Socialism
had its origin in Marxian theory.
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