leaders of Russia--and those Socialists who co-operated with
them--attempted to ignore the biggest and most vital fact in the whole
situation, namely, the fact that the Revolution was essentially a
Socialist Revolution in the sense that the overwhelming mass of the people
were bent upon the realization of a very comprehensive, though somewhat
crudely conceived, program of socialization. It was not a mere political
Revolution, and political changes which left the essential social structure
unchanged, which did not tend to bring about equality of democratic
opportunity, and which left the control of the nation in the hands of
landowners and capitalists, could never satisfy the masses nor fail to
invite their savage attack. Only the most hopeless and futile of
doctrinaires could have argued themselves into believing anything else. It
was quite idle to argue from the experience of other countries that Russia
must follow the universal rule and establish and maintain bourgeois rule
for a period more or less prolonged. True, that had been the experience of
most nations, but it was foolish in the extreme to suppose that it must be
the experience of Russia, whose conditions were so utterly unlike those
which had obtained in any nation which had by revolution established
constitutional government upon a democratic basis.

To begin with, in every other country revolution by the bourgeoisie itself
had been the main factor in the overthrow of autocracy. Feudalism and
monarchical autocracy fell in western Europe before the might of a powerful
rising class. That this class in every case drew to its side the masses and
benefited by their co-operation must not be allowed to obscure the fact
that in these other countries of all the classes in society the bourgeoisie
was the most powerful. It was that fact which established its right to rule
in place of the deposed rulers. The Russian middle class, however, lacked
that historic right to rule. In consequence of the backwardness of the
nation from the point of view of industrial development, the bourgeoisie
was correspondingly backward and weak. Never in any country had a class so
weak and uninfluential essayed the role of the ruling class. To believe
that a class which at the most did not exceed six per cent. of the
population could assert and maintain its rule over a nation of one hundred
and eighty millions of people, when these had been stirred by years of
revolutionary agitation, was at