The weakness of the capitalists in the fight on behalf of private property may be explained in part by their want of allies in the other classes in the community.  The Russian peasant, reared in the atmosphere of communal land ownership, was far from being a fanatical defender of private property.  No Thiers could have rallied a Russian peasant army for the suppression of a communistic industrial wage-earning class by an appeal to their property instinct.  To make matters worse for the capitalists, the peasant’s strongest craving was for more land, all the land, without compensation!  This the capitalists, being capitalists, were unable to grant.  Yet it was the only sort of currency which the peasant would accept in payment for his political support.  In November, 1917, when the Bolsheviki seized the government, one of their first acts was to satisfy the peasant’s land hunger by turning over to his use all the land.  The “proletariat” had then a free hand so far as the most numerous class in Russia was concerned.

Just as the capitalist class reached the threshold of the revolution psychologically below par, so the wage-earning class in developing the will to rule outran all expectations and beat the Marxian time-schedule.  Among the important contributing factors was the unity of the industrial laboring class, a unity broken by no rifts between highly paid skilled groups and an inferior unskilled class, or between a well-organized labor aristocracy and an unorganized helot class.  The economic and social oppression under the old regime had seen to it that no group of laborers should possess a stake in the existing order or desire to separate from the rest.  Moreover, for several decades, and especially since the memorable days of the revolution of 1905, the laboring class has been filled by socialistic agitators and propagandists with ideas of the great historical role of the proletariat.  The writer remembers how in 1905 even newspapers of the moderately liberal stamp used to speak of the “heroic proletariat marching in the van of Russia’s progress.”  No wonder then that, when the revolution came, the industrial wage earners had developed such self-confidence as a class that they were tempted to disregard the dictum of their intellectual mentors that this was merely to be a bourgeois revolution—­with the social revolution still remote.  Instead they listened to the slogan “All power to the Soviets.”

The idea of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” reached maturity in the course of the abortive revolution of 1905-1906.  After a victory for the people in October, 1905, the bourgeoisie grew frightened over the aggressiveness of the wage-earning class and sought safety in an understanding with the autocracy.  An order by the Soviet of Petrograd workmen in November, 1905, decreeing the eight-hour day in all factories sufficed to make the capitalists forego their historical role of champions of popular liberty against autocracy.