ary
movements during the past twenty or twenty-five years knows that during all
that time one of the principal subjects of controversy among Socialists was
the land question and the proper method of solving it. The "Narodniki," or
peasant Socialists, later organized into the Socialist-Revolutionary party,
wanted distribution of the land belonging to the big estates among the
peasant communes, to be co-operatively owned and managed. They did not want
land nationalization, which was the program of the Marxists--the Social
Democrats. This latter program meant that, instead of the land being
divided among the peasants' communal organizations, it should be owned,
used, and managed by the state, the principles of large-scale production
and wage labor being applied to agriculture in the same manner as to
industry.

The attitude of the Social Democratic party toward the peasant Socialists
and their program was characterized by that same certainty that small
agricultural holdings were to pass away, and by the same contemptuous
attitude toward the peasant life and peasant aspirations that we find in
the writings of Marx, Engels, Liebknecht, and many other Marxists.[79]
Lenine himself had always adopted this attitude. He never trusted the
peasants and was opposed to any program which would give the land to them
as they desired. Mr. Walling, who spent nearly three years in Russia,
including the whole period of the Revolution of 1905-06, writes of Lenine's
position at that time:

Like Alexinsky, Lenine awaits the agrarian movement ... and hopes
that a railway strike with the destruction of the lines of
communication and _the support of the peasantry_ may some day put
the government of Russia into the people's hands. However, I was
shocked to find that this important leader also, though he expects
a full co-operation with the peasants on equal terms, _during the
Revolution_, feels toward them a very _deep distrust_, thinking
them to a large extent bigoted and blindly patriotic, and fearing
that they may some day shoot down the working-men as the French
peasants did during the Paris Commune.

The chief basis for this distrust is, of course, the prejudiced
feeling that the peasants are not likely to become good
Socialists. _It is on this account that Lenine and all the Social
Democratic leaders place their hopes on a future development of
large agricultural estates in Russi