nd by their
petty bourgeois aides. On one hand, they declared the Soviet rule
simply something absurd and anarchically wild, carefully avoiding
all our historical comparisons and theoretical proofs that the
Soviets are a higher form of democracy; nay, more, the beginning
of a _Socialist_ form of democracy. On the other hand, they demand
of us a higher democracy than the bourgeois and argue: with your
Bolshevist (_i.e._, Socialist, not bourgeois) democratic
principles, with the Soviet democratic principles, individual
dictatorship is absolutely incompatible.

Extremely poor arguments, these. If we are not Anarchists, we must
admit the necessity of a state--that is, of _compulsion_, for the
transition from capitalism to Socialism. The form of compulsion is
determined by the degree of development of the particular
revolutionary class, then by such special circumstances as, for
instance, the heritage of a long and reactionary war, and then by
the forms of resistance of the bourgeoisie and the petty
bourgeoisie. _There is therefore absolutely no contradiction in
principle between the Soviet (Socialist) democracy and the use of
dictatorial power of individuals_. The distinction between a
proletarian and a bourgeois dictatorship consists in this: that
the first directs its attacks against the exploiting minority in
the interests of the exploited majority; and, further, in this,
that the first is accomplished (also through individuals) not only
by the masses of the exploited toilers, but also by the
organizations which are so constructed that they arouse these
masses to historical creative work (the Soviets belong to this
kind of organization).[75]

This, then, is Bolshevism, not as it is seen and described by unfriendly
"bourgeois" writers, but as it is seen and described by the acknowledged
intellectual and political leader of the Bolsheviki, Nikolai Lenine. I have
not taken any non-Bolshevist authority; I have not even restated his views
in a summary of my own, lest into the summary might be injected some
reflexes of my own critical thought. Bolshevism is revealed in all its
reactionary repulsiveness as something between which and absolute,
individual dictatorial power there is "absolutely no contradiction in
principle." It will not avail for our American followers and admirers of
the Bolsheviki to plead that these t