e immediate publication of all such treaties; (6) the
workers to propose at once and publicly an immediate truce and negotiations
of peace, these to be carried on by the proletariat and not by and with the
bourgeoisie; (7) bourgeois war debts to be paid exclusively by the
capitalists.

According to Litvinov, who is certainly not an unfriendly authority, as
soon as Lenine arrived in Russia he submitted a new program to his party
which was so novel, and so far a departure from accepted Socialist
principles, that "Lenine's own closest friends shrank from it and refused
to accept it."[13]

This program involved the abandonment of the plans made for holding the
Constituent Assembly, or, at any rate, such a radical change as to amount
to the abandonment of the accepted plans. _He proposed that universal,
equal, direct, and secret suffrage be frankly abandoned, and that only the
industrial proletariat and the poorest section of the peasantry be
permitted to vote at all!_ Against the traditional Socialist view that
class distinctions must be wiped out and the class war ended by the
victorious proletariat, Lenine proposed to make the class division more
rigid and enduring. He proposed to give the sole control of Russia into the
hands of not more than two hundred thousand workers in a land of one
hundred and eighty millions of people, more than one hundred and
thirty-five millions of whom were peasants!

Of course, there could be no reconciliation between such views as these and
the universally accepted Socialist principle of democratic government.
Lenine did not hesitate to declare that democracy itself was a "bourgeois
conception" which the revolutionary proletariat must overthrow, a
declaration hard to reconcile with his demand for a "democratic republic."
Russia must not become a democratic republic, he argued, for a democratic
republic is a bourgeois republic. Again and again, during the time we are
discussing and later, Lenine assailed the principle of democratic
government. "Since March, 1917, the word 'democracy' is simply a shackle
fastened upon the revolutionary nation," he declared in an article written
after the Bolsheviki had overthrown Kerensky.[14]

When democracy is abolished, parliamentary government goes with it. From
the first days after his return to Russia Lenine advocated, instead of a
parliamentary republic similar to that of France or the United States, what
he called a Soviet republic, which would be f