Page:Lev Borisovich Kamenev - The Dictatorship of the Proletariat (1920).pdf/8

 the bourgeoisie showing any resistance to the proletariat at the decisive hour of the expropriation of the exploiters.

Propaganda based on this may be dictated either by individual stupidity, or the interest of a group of persons in concealing from the proletariat the circumstances of the forthcoming struggle, and in preventing it from preparing for the same.

When persons, calling themselves Socialists, declare that the course of dictatorship, admissible and explicable for Russia, is in no wise obligatory or inevitable for any other capitalist country, they proclaim a thing directly contrary to truth. The actual Russian bourgeoisie always was, and up to the October Revolution remained, the least organised, the least conscious in the sense of class, the least united of all bourgeois classes in the countries of the old capitalist order. The Russian peasantry had not time enough to develop that class of strong and politically-united-peasants, which is the basis of a series of bourgeois parties in the West. The Russian middle class of the towns, crushed and politically unenlightened, never represented anything like such groups of the population as, in the West, create and support the parties of "Christian Socialism" and anti-Semitism.

The first thunder claps of the proletarian revolution broke over this politically backward, inactive and unorganised class. "The resistance of the exploiters" to the blows of the Russian proletariat must therefore be considered as comparatively weak—weak, naturally only in comparison with the activity which the bourgeoisie of any other European country will be able to develop. The actively resisting element, which dragged on the struggle for three years, were not the unorganised forces of the Russian bourgeoisie, but, first of all, foreign interventionists, and then the bourgeoisie of the border countries (Finland, Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine), which, playing upon the century-old hatred against Tsarist Russia, managed to unite under the flag of nationalism certain organised groups for resistance against the Russian prole-