at the
Socialism of the Socialist-Revolutionists and the Mensheviki, the Socialism
of Kerensky and the men who were the majority of the Constituent Assembly,
was the product of Russian life and Russian economic development, while the
Socialism that the Bolsheviki tried by force of arms to impose upon Russia
was as un-Russian as it could be. The Bolshevist conception of Socialism
had its origin in Marxian theory. Both Marx and Engels freely predicted the
setting up of "a dictatorship of the proletariat"--the phrase which the
Bolsheviki have made their own.

Yet, the Bolsheviki are not Marxians. Their Socialism is as little Marxian
as Russian. When Marx and Engels forecasted the establishment of
proletarian dictatorship it was part of their theorem that economic
evolution would have reduced practically all the masses to a proletarian
state; that industrial and commercial concentration would have reached such
a stage of development that there would be on the one side a small class
of owners, and, on the other side, the proletariat. There would be, they
believed, no middle class. The disappearance of the middle class was, for
them and for their followers, a development absolutely certain to take
place. They saw the same process going on with the same result in
agriculture. It might be less rapid in its progress, but not one whit less
certain. It was only as the inevitable climax to this evolution that they
believed the "dictatorship of the proletariat" would be achieved. In other
words, the proletariat would be composed of the overwhelming majority of
the body politic and social. That is very different from the Bolshevist
attempt to set up the dictatorship of the proletariat in a land where more
than 85 per cent, of the people are peasants; where industrial development
is behind the rest of the world, and where dictatorship of the proletariat
means the domination of more than one hundred and eighty millions of people
by two hundred thousand "proletarians and the poorest peasants," according
to Lenine's statement, or by six per cent. of the population _if we assume
the entire proletariat to be united in the dictatorship!_

V

At the time of the disturbances which took place in Petrograd in December,
over the delay in holding the Constituent Assembly, the Bolshevik
government announced that the Constituante would be permitted to convene on
January 18th, provided that not less than four hundred delegates were in
attendance