Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/59

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III

PARTY DIVISIONS.

The following is an attempt to formulate, first, the more important, and second, the less important, of the questions and answers characteristic of the present situation (early in April) in Russia, and of the attitude the various parties take to the present state of affairs.

Questions

1.—What are the chief groupings of political parties in Russia?

A (more to the right than the Cadets). Parties and groups more right than the Constitutional Democrats.

B (Cadets). Constitutional Democratic Party (Cadets, the National Liberty party) and the groups closely attached to them.

C (Social Democrats and Social Revolutionists). The S. D.'s, S. R.'s and the groups closely attached to them.

D (Bolsheviki). The party which ought properly to be called the Communist Party, and which is at present termed "The Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party, united with the Central Committee;" or, in popular language, the "Bolsheviki."

2.—What class do these parties represent? What class standpoints do they express?

A. The feudal landholders and the more backward sections of the bourgeoisie.

B. The mass of the bourgeoisie:, that is, the capitalists, and those landholders who have the industrial, bourgeois ideology.

C. Small entrepreneurs, small and middle-class proprietors, small and more or less well-to-do peasants, petite bourgeoisie, as well as those workers who have submitted to a bourgeois point of view.

D. Class conscious workers, day laborers and the poorest classes of peasantry, who are classed with the proletariat (semi-proletariat.)