The peasants—all sections of them—could not but rise—and actually did rise—in this war against the landowners. The struggle allied the poorest peasant class, which does not live by the exploitation of hired labour, with the more prosperous and even with the richest section of the peasantry, which cannot exist without hired labour.
So long as our Revolution was still preoccupied with this problem, so long as we had still to strain every nerve to the end that an independent peasant movement, assisted by the workers in the towns, might really sweep away and finally destroy the power of the landowners—so long our Revolution remained essentially the work of the entire peasantry, and for that reason could not free itself from its bourgeois setting. It did not as yet touch the stronger, the more up-to-date enemy of all workers—that is, Capitalism. It threatened, consequently, to remain half-finished, just as the majority of revolutions had remained in Western Europe, where a temporary alliance of urban workers with all the peasantry succeeded in overthrowing the Monarch, in sweeping away the remnants of medievalism, and in destroying, more or less completely, the great estates or the power of the landowners, but never succeeded in tearing up the foundations themselves of that power—viz., Capitalism.
It was to this task, much more important and much more difficult, that our Revolution began to turn its energies since summer and autumn of this year. A wave of counter-revolutionary revolts arose in the summer of this year, when all the elements that stand for exploitation and oppression in Russian life joined the campaign started against Russia by the Western European Imperialists and by their Czecho-Slovak hirelings; and it was this wave which awakened new activities and new life in the village. The risings united in practice, in a desperate struggle against Soviet power, the European Imperialists, their mercenaries, the Czecho-Slovaks, and all that remained in Russia on the side of the Capitalists and of the landlords; and, in their train, the village vultures revolted also. The village then ceased to be
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