heviki came into power they sought first of all to split the
peasant Socialist movement and gain the support of its extreme left wing.
For this reason they agreed to adopt the program of the Revolutionary
Socialist party. It was Marie Spiridonova who made that arrangement
possible. It was, in fact, a political deal. Lenine and Trotzky, on behalf
of the Bolshevik government, agreed to accept the land policy of the
Socialist-Revolutionists, and in return Spiridonova and her friends agreed
to support the Bolsheviki. There is abundant evidence of the truth of the
following account of Professor Ross:

Among the first acts of the Bolsheviki in power was to square
their debt to the left wing of the Social Revolutionists, their
ally in the _coup d'etat_. The latter would accept only one kind
of currency--the expropriation of the private landowners without
compensation and the transfer of all land into the hands of the
peasant communes. The Bolsheviki themselves, as good Marxists,
took no stock in the peasants' commune. As such, pending the
introduction of Socialism, they should, perhaps, have nationalized
the land and rented it to the highest bidder, regardless of
whether it was to be tilled in small parcels without hired labor
or in large blocks on the capitalistic plan. The land edict of
November does, indeed, decree land nationalism; however, the vital
proviso is added that "the use of the land must be equalized--that
is, according to local conditions and according to the ability to
work and the needs of each individual," and further that "the
hiring of labor is not permitted." The administrative machinery is
thus described: "All the confiscated land becomes the land capital
of the nation. Its distribution among the working-people is to be
in charge of the local and central authorities, beginning with the
organized rural and urban communities and ending with the
provincial central organs." Such is the irony of fate. _Those who
had charged the rural land commune with being the most serious
brake upon Russia's progress, and who had stigmatized the
People-ists as reactionaries and Utopians, now came to enact into
law most of their tenets--the equalization of the use of land, the
prohibition of the hiring of labor, and everything else!_[82]

The much-praised land policy of the Bolsheviki is, in fact, not a Bolshevik
policy at