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 42 from the definite point of view held by these comrades concerning our revolution. Of course, if our revolution is a bourgeois revolution and far from being completed at that, if it is not merging into a Socialist revolution (because the proletariat is weak and the majority of the population of the country, the peasantry, cannot be utilised as a force to help the proletarian revolution), it follows that the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat under the given conditions is a task impossible of fulfilment, a dangerous and impracticable undertaking. The Party may be compelled blind-folded to rush into this adventure, but nothing will come of it, as nothing comes from any adventure: the Party will meet inevitable destruction, either immediately or some little time after it has taken power. There can be no other result, for even if it manages to consolidate its power it can hold on only by naked violence, by the bayonet of dictatorship; and to sit on a bayonet is uncomfortable and unstable. In such a position the Party will not be able to avoid its isolation from the proletariat, nor prevent the circle of the revolutionary forces being narrowed down to its own ranks; and, in spite of its own desires, it must reveal the absurdity and impracticability of its actions and surrender the revolution to the flood and destruction.

It will not be superfluous to observe here that among these first conclusions drawn from the theory of disbelief in the possibility of a Socialist revolution in Russia, the theory of lack of faith in the strength of our proletariat and under-estimation of the, peasantry, there was already heard the note which later was to be repeated again and again in every outbreak of opposition temper. "The proletariat is weak, we can expect no aid from anywhere—not even from the countryside! What is the