Page:Solomon Abramovich Lozovsky - Lenin, The Great Strategist of the Class War - tr. Alexander Bittleman (1924).pdf/24



ENIN'S sense for reality has manifested itself also in the fact that long before the revolution he was able to estimate correctly the significance of the peasantry. Most of the Marxians had a very poor conception of the role of the peasants in the approaching revolution. From the fact that agriculture was subservient to city industry and that small-scale production was gradually disappearing, many Marxians drew the conclusion that the peasants will not play in the revolution any active part at all or else will play a reactionary part.

As far back as 1905, Lenin already perceived the insufficiency of the agrarian program. of the Social-Democratic Party. Immediately upon the beginning of the wide revolutionary movement among the peasants in 1905, he formulated the demand for the nationalization of the land. Lenin's slogan at that time was: "The dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry." He saw the necessity for an alliance of these two classes in order to remove the power of the large land-owners. As the February revolution was developing, making clear the extent of the change that was to come, and as he realized that Russia would not satisfy itself with a bourgeois democracy, he commenced propounding in a practical fashion the problem of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry which was to be incorporated in the Russian Soviet State.

As an expert in the agrarian problems, and as one well versed in the applied phases of political economy, Lenin had been well aware of the fact that the peasantry cannot play any independent role. But for this very reason, he said, it is our duty to win the peasantry over to the side of the proletariat. He had been writing and saying: "The peasantry will support either the bourgeoisie or the proletariat. The peasantry stands to gain from the proletariat much more than from the bourgeoisie. Particularly if we pursue such a policy as to disabuse the peasantry of its prejudices against the dictatorship of the proletariat." Hence his slogan: "An alliance between the proletariat and the peasantry," and the policy of winning the masses of the villages for the support of the political and economic policies of the working class.