Page:William Zebulon Foster - The Russian Revolution (1921).pdf/113

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voice and is a very effective speaker. She has travelled in many countries and has a wide knowledge of the labor movement.

To the foregoing list of notable revolutionary figures might be added the names of hundreds of others equally, or in some cases, even better known, such as Shliapnikov of the Department of Labor; Noghin, Larin, Bogdanov, Milyutin, and Rykov of the Supreme Economic Council; Dzerjinsky of the Extraordinary Commission; Preobrazhensky of the Department of Finance, and very many more, but we cannot even mention them in our limited space.

Nearly all of the most distinguished and effective Russian leaders, from Lenin down, came from the middle and upper classes; few indeed among them are actual workers and peasants. It has been truly said that the early revolutionary movement in Russia did not originate with the masses, but was brought to them by the intellectuals. This is partly true everywhere, but nowhere so much as in Russia. Which is another indication of how very backward the Russian working class really was. But if these leaders started out as non-worker elements, they eventually became thoroughly proletarianized by knocking around the world and living the hard life of the toilers. So that now they, despite their bourgeois origin, are more profoundly working class in thought and action than any other body of labor leaders in the world.

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