Page:Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade (1920).pdf/102

 land committees and the district Soviets' and peasants' delegates, pending the solution of the land question by the Constituent Assembly."

Having quoted these two clauses only, Kautsky concludes- "The reference to the Constituent Assembly has remained a dead letter. In point of fact, the peasants in the cantons were able to dispose of the land as they wanted" (p. 4).

Here you have an example of Kautksy's criticisms. Here you have a learned work which is uncommonly like a forgery. Kautsky suggests to the German reader that the Bolshevisk have capuitulated to the peasantry on the question of private property in land, and that they have permitted the peasants to deal locally with the land as they wanted. But in reality the decree quoted by Kautsky (it was first promulgated publicly on November 7th, 1917), consisted not of two, but of five clauses, plus eight clauses of an Instruction which, it was expressly stated, "must serve for guidance." Now, in the third clause of the Decree it is stated that the farms are transferred to the people and that an "exact inventory of the property" must be drawn up, and a "strict revolutionary watch over it" must be established. In its turn, the Instruction declares that "the right of private property in land is abolished forever," that farms of high cultural development are "not subject to division," and that "the entire agricultural stock, live and dead, of the confiscated estates is placed at the disposal of the State or the Commune, according to their size and value, without compensation," and that "the entire land becomes a land reserve for the entire people."

Then, simultaneously with the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly on January 5th, 1918, the Third Congress of Soviets adopted a "Declaration of Rights of the Laboring and Exploited Masses," which now forms part of the Fundamental Statute of the Soviet Republic. Article 2, par. 1. of this Declaration proclaims that "private