It is easy to understand the distrust of the Bolsheviki by the Socialist parties and groups which represented the peasants.  The latter class constituted more than 85 per cent. of the population.  Moreover, it had furnished the great majority of the fighters in the revolutionary movement.  Its leaders and spokesmen resented the idea that they were to be dictated to and controlled by a minority, which was, as Lenine himself admitted, not materially more numerous than the old ruling class of landowners had been.  They wanted a democratic governmental system, free from class rule, while the Bolsheviki wanted class rule.  Generalizations are proverbially perilous, and should be very cautiously made and applied to great currents of thought and of life.  But in a broad sense we may fairly say that 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!

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