Page:Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade (1920).pdf/96

 Soviets included at the time the peasantry as a whole, the class divisions among the latter being still in embryo, still latent.

The process of ripening took place in the summer and autumn of 1918. The Czecho-Slovak counter-revolutionary mutiny aroused the village vultures, and the wave of well-to-do peasant insurrections passed over the entire territory of Russia. The poorest peasantry was learning from life itself, and not from books or newspapers, the fact of the antagonism of its interests to those of the vultures and the village bourgeoisie in general. Like every other petty bourgeois party, the so-called Left Social-Revolutionaries were reflecting the hesitations of the masses, and in the summer of 1918 split into two. One section made common cause with the Czecho-Slovaks (insurrection in Moscow, when Proshyan having seized the telegraph office for one hour was informing Russia of the overthrow of the Bolsheviks; then the treachery of Muravioff, commander of the army against the Czecho-Slovaks, etc.), while another section, the one mentioned above, remained with the Bolsheviks.

The intensification of food distress in the towns was rendering the question about the corn monopoly more and more acute (Kautsky, the theoretician, has, in his "economic analysis" which is a mere repetition of platitudes gleaned from Masloff’s writings of ten years previously, quite forgotten about this monopoly). The old landlords' and capitalists' State, and even the democratic and republican one, had been sending into the villages, armed detachments, who were practically at the disposal of the capitalists. Mr. Kautsky knows, of course, nothing about it. He does not see in it the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. God forbid! That is "pure democracy," especially if it is approved by a bourgeois parliament. Nor does Kautsky know or speak about the fact in the summer and the autumn of 1917, Avksentieff and S. Masloff, in