Page:Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade (1920).pdf/98

 Revolutionaries the "contraction" (p. 37) of the circle of those who support the Bolsheviks,—at the very time, the real circle of the supporters of Bolshevism was extending immeasurably, as millions and millions of the village poor were freeing themselves from the tutelage of the village vultures and the village bourgeoisie, and were waking up to an independent political life. We, indeed, have lost hundreds of Left Social-Revolutionaries, hundreds of spineless intellectuals, hundreds of village vultures, but we have gained millions of the poorer peasantry. One year after the proletarian revolution in the capitals the turn came, under its influence and with its assistance, of the proletarian revolution in the country-side, which finally consolidated the power of the Soviets and Bolshevism, and finally proved that the latter had no longer to fear any hostile power in the interior. Thus, after completing the bourgeois-democratic revolution in alliance with the entire peasantry as a whole, the Russian proletariat has passed defnitely to the socialist revolution, having succeeded in splitting up the village, in rallying to its side the village proletariat and semi-proletariat, and in uniting them against the exploiters and the bourgeoisie, including the peasant one.

If the Bolshevik proletariat in the capitals and large industrial centres had not been able to rally to its side the village poor against the peasant rich, this would have proved Russia's unripeness for the socialist revolution. The peasantry would then have remained an undivided whole, that is, under the economic, political, and moral leadership of the village vultures, of the rich and the bourgeoisie, and the revolution would not have passed beyond the bourgeois-democratic limits. (It must be said that even so, it would not have meant that the proletariat