Page:Pavel Ivanovich Biryukov - The New Russia - tr. Emile Burns (1920).djvu/13

 to go and take part in the new life which is being built up in Russia.

The reforms have been radical. Before the 1905 Revolution a print used to be in circulation in revolutionary Russian circles representing the social pyramid. At the top of the pyramid was the Czar, being blessed by the Holy Spirit descending from Heaven. On the next stage were his ministers. After these came the intellectuals and the scholars, the bureaucrats, the artists, and then the merchants and business people. At the very bottom were the workers with bent backs supporting the whole weight of this social pyramid. The Revolution has turned this pyramid upside down. The classes which had been at the bottom straightened their backs and took into their hands the Government of the Russian State, and their rule is called the dictatorship of the proletariat. This complete reversal of things took place with comparative ease. There was very little resistance. The bourgeois class in Russia is estimated at ten per cent., or even less, of the population. It was quite unable to make any resistance, and as a matter of fact there was no "class war." All the incidents in which bloodshed occurred were the result of struggles between the political parties which were aiming at appropriating to themselves the power which the Communists had seized.

The working class thus summoned to the Government of the country was not ready for this most difficult task. The whole giant mechanism of a State comprising 180,000,000 of people stood still for lack of food and for lack of trained mechanics who might have kept it going.

One section of the intellectuals, engineers, professors, doctors, artists, men of letters, all belonging to other political parties, feeling themselves no longer to take an