Its distribution among the working-people is to be
in charge of the local and central authorities, beginning with the
organized rural and urban communities and ending with the
provincial central organs." Such is the irony of fate. _Those who
had charged the rural land commune with being the most serious
brake upon Russia's progress, and who had stigmatized the
People-ists as reactionaries and Utopians, now came to enact into
law most of their tenets--the equalization of the use of land, the
prohibition of the hiring of labor, and everything else!_[82]
The much-praised land policy of the Bolsheviki is, in fact, not a Bolshevik
policy at all, but one which they have accepted as a compromise for
temporary political advantage. "Claim everything in sight," said a noted
American politician on one occasion to his followers. Our followers of the
Bolsheviki, taught by a very clever propaganda, seem to be acting upon that
maxim. They claim for the Bolsheviki everything which can in the slightest
manner win favor with the American public, notwithstanding that it involves
claiming for the Bolsheviki credit to which they are not entitled. As early
as May 18, 1917, it was announced by the Provisional Government that the
"question of the transfer of the land to the toilers" was to be left to the
Constituent Assembly, and there was never a doubt in the mind of any
Russian Socialist how that body would settle it; never a moment when it was
doubted that the Constituent Assembly would be controlled by the
Socialist-Revolutionary party.
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