ormed upon these lines: local
government would be carried on by local Soviets composed of delegates
elected by "the working class and the poorest peasantry," to use a common
Bolshevik phrase which bothers a great many people whose minds insist upon
classifying peasants as "working-people" and part of the working class.
What Lenine means when he uses the phrase, and what Litvinov means[15] is
that the industrial wage-workers--to whom is applied the term "working
class"--must be sharply distinguished from peasants and small farmers,
though the very poorest peasants, not being conservative, as more
prosperous peasants are, can be united with the wage-workers.

These local Soviets functioning in local government would, in Lenine's
Soviet republic, elect delegates to a central committee of all the Soviets
in the country, and that central committee would be the state. Except in
details of organization, this is not materially different from the
fundamental idea of the I.W.W. with which we are familiar.[16] According to
the latter, the labor-unions, organized on industrial lines and federated
through a central council, will take the place of parliamentary government
elected on territorial lines. According to the Bolshevik plan, Soviets
would take the place held by the unions in the plan of the I.W.W. It is not
to be wondered at that, in the words of Litvinov, Lenine's own closest
friends shrank from his scheme and Lenine "was compelled to drop it for a
time."

V

Bolshevism was greatly strengthened in its leadership by the return of Leon
Trotzky, who arrived in Petrograd on May 17th. Trotzky was born in Moscow
about forty-five years ago. Like Lenine, he is of bourgeois origin, his
father being a wealthy Moscow merchant. He is a Jew and his real name is
Bronstein. To live under an assumed name has always been a common practice
among Russian revolutionists, for very good and cogent reasons. Certainly
all who knew anything at all of the personnel of the Russian revolutionary
movement during the past twenty years knew that Trotzky was Bronstein, and
that he was a Jew. The idea, assiduously disseminated by a section of the
American press, that there must be something discreditable or mysterious
connected with his adoption of an alias is extremely absurd, and can only
be explained by monumental ignorance of Russian revolutionary history.

Trotzky has been a fighter in the ranks of the revolutionary army of Russia
for twenty year