Page:Lenin - The Land Revolution in Russia - ed. Philip Snowden (1919).pdf/6

 homogeneous. In that community, which had fought as one man against the landlords, two camps were now formed: the camp of the labouring, the poorest peasants, who, together with the town workers, continued resolutely on the path towards the realisation of Socialism, and were passing from the war against landlords to the war against Capitalism, against the power of money, against exploitation for selfish ends of the great agrarian transformation; and the camp of the richer peasants. This struggle, which finally, definitely freed the Revolution from the propertied and exploiting classes, it was which shunted our Revolution, in all its entirety, on to the Socialist track on which the workers of the towns had firmly and resolutely intended to set it in November, but in which they would have never been able victoriously to guide it if they had not found conscious and united support in the villages.

That, then, is the significance of the Revolution which took place this summer and autumn in the most obscure corners of rural Russia—a Revolution that was not noisy, was not so patently visible and arresting as the November Revolution of last year, but which has a still greater, immeasurably more profound and important meaning.

The formation in the villages of the committees of the poor was the turning point, and showed that the working class of the towns, which united last November with all the peasants for the purpose of destroying the chief enemy of free, labouring and Socialist Russia—the landowners—had advanced from that problem to another, much more difficult, historically much higher, and really Socialistic. This was to stimulate in the villages, too, the understanding that the great agrarian Revolution, the November proclamation abolishing private property in land, and socialising it, would inevitably remain a mere paper reform if the town workers did not awaken to life the village proletariat, the village poor, the labouring peasantry, which constitutes the enormous majority, which, in common with the "middle" peasantry, does not exploit hired labour, and is not interested in such exploitation, and which, therefore, is capable of