Page:Vladimir Ilyich Lenin - Lessons of the Revolution (1918).djvu/18

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is the program. So do the capitalists and landlords, holding as they do the majority in the government, laugh and scoff at the poor peasants.

II.

But how did all this come to pass in a land where the rule of Tsardom has been overthrown? In a country that is not free the people are governed by a Tsar and a handful of capitalists, landlords, and bureaucrats elected by no one.

In a free country. the people are governed by those whom they themselves have chosen for this very purpose. At the elections the people divide themselves into parties, and as a rule every class of the population forms its own party; thus the landlords, the capitalists, the peasents, the workmen have each their own parties. So, in free countries the government of a nation is shaped and influenced by the open struggle between parties and by their final agreements among themselves.

After the overthrow of the Tsar's regime, Feb. 27, 1917, Russia for about four months was governed like a free country, namely by means of an open struggle between freely organized parties and of free agreements among themselves. In order therefore to understand the development of the Russian revolution it is most important to scrutinize the nature of the various parties, the interests they have been defending, and finally, the relations of these parties to one another.