, for it was common knowledge. There is no
truth whatever in the claim set up by many of the apologists for the
Bolsheviki that they became enraged and resorted to desperate tactics
because nothing effective was being done to realize the aims of the
Revolution, to translate its ideals into fact. Quite the contrary is true.
_The Bolshevik insurrection was precipitated by its leaders precisely
because they saw that the Provisional Government was loyally and
intelligently carrying out the program of the Revolution, in co-operation
with the majority of the working-class organizations and their leaders._

The Bolsheviki did not want the ideals of the Revolution to be realized,
for the very simple reason that they were opposed to those ideals. In all
the long struggle from Herzen to Kerensky the revolutionary movement of
Russia had stood for political democracy first of all. Now, at the moment
when political democracy was being realized, the Bolsheviki sought to kill
it and to set up something else--namely, a dictatorship of a small party of
less than two hundred thousand over a nation of one hundred and eighty
millions. There can be no dispute as to this aim; it has been stated by
Lenine with great frankness. "_Just as one hundred and fifty thousand
lordly landowners under Czarism dominated the one hundred and thirty
millions of Russian peasants, so two hundred thousand members of the
Bolshevik party are imposing their proletarian will on the mass, but this
time in the interest of the latter._"[23]

Lenine's figures probably exaggerate the Bolshevik numbers, but, assuming
them to be accurate, can anybody in his right mind, knowing anything of the
history of the Russian revolutionary movement, believe that the
substitution of a ruling class of one hundred and fifty thousand by one of
two hundred thousand, to govern a nation of one hundred and eighty
millions, was the end to which so many lives were sacrificed? Can any sane
and sincere person believe that the class domination described by the great
arch-Bolshevik himself comes within measurable distance of being as much of
a realization of the ideals of the Revolution as did the Constituent
Assembly plan with its basis of political democracy, universal, equal,
direct, secret, all-determining suffrage? We do not forget Lenine's
statement that this new domination of the people by a ruling minority
differs from the old regime in that the Bolsheviki are imposing their will
upon th