Kautsky then charges the Bolsheviks, the party of the proletariat, with having surrendered the dictatorship and the work of carrying out Socialism unto the hands of the small bourgeois peasantry. Excellent, Mr. Kautsky! But what, in your enlightened opinion, ought to have been the attitude of the proletarian party towards the small-bourgeois peasantry? Our theoretician, bearing in mind that silence is golden, prefers not to say anything on the subject, but gives himself away by the following statement: "At the beginning of the Soviet Republic the peasants' Soviets were organizations of the peasantry as a whole. But now the Soviet Republic proclaims that the Soviets are organizations of the proletariat and the poorer peasantry. The well-to-do peasants are thus disfranchised for the Soviets. The poor peasant is declared to be the permanent and wholesale product of the Socialist agrarian reform under the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat" (p. 48).
What a deadly irony! It can be heard from the lips of any bourgeois in Russia! They all mock and sarcastically note that the Soviet Republic openly admits the existence of the poorest peasantry. They laugh at Socialism; but this is their right. But a "Socialist" who laughs at the idea that after a most ruinous four years' war there should remain in Russia (and would remain yet for a long time) poor peasants—such a Socialist could only have been born at a time of wholesale apostasy.
Listen further: "The Soviet Republic interferes in the relations between the rich and poor peasants, but not by way of a new distribution of land. In order to relieve the scarcity of corn in the towns, detachments of workers are sent into the villages where they take away all surplus stocks from the richer peasants. Part of that stock is distributed among the town population, the other part among the poor peasants" (p. 48).
Of course, Kautsky, the Socialist and the Marxist, is deeply revolted at the idea that such a measure should
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