The World Significance of the Russian Revolution/Section 15
XV. The Disillusionment.
The truth is that all over Russia the peasants and the workmen are now realising, too late, that by their apathy and ignorance, they had allowed the growing disaffection of a greedy and rapacious bourgeoisie (commercialists) to undermine a benevolent but weakly paternal and disorganised government. And so, after the inevitable fall of their hopelessly inefficient bourgeois-socialist successors—the Kerensky idealists—the way was prepared for the present despots; who have turned their quandam dupes, whom in their own jargon, they had named "wage slaves," into real slaves, working under conditions of forced labour at the bayonet point, without the wages necessary to buy sufficient food.
They now know, to their cost, what "communism" is and they want none of it. They know that "communism" which, as propaganda, is always designed to appeal to the acquisitive and covetous instincts (therefore egoistic and anti-communistic) of those who think they have least to lose and most to gain, but which as actual fact, has deprived them of everything that ever gave a zest to life for the privilege of being the bondsmen of Jews and international revolutionaries.
And among no class is this disillusionment more bitter than among the peasants who form 85 per cent. of the total population. They very naturally keenly resented the Bolshevik agrarian decrees by which they tried to take the land back from the peasants in order "to nationalise" it and turn it into communal property.
So the Bolsheviks countered their resistance by organizing committees of "poorest peasants," which included the waster and criminal dregs of the villages. And these were given power over their more industrious and thrifty neighbours.
Lenin himself, of course, knew well enough that the period of disillusionment, which would inevitably follow the initial breaking up period, must be reckoned for. He wrote a tract in 1905 (N. Lénine, Deux Tactiques de la Démocratie Socialiste dans la Révolution Démocratique. Published at Geneva), in which he wrote: "The time will come when the struggle against the Autocratic Government will be over. When that time comes it will be ridiculous to talk of the voluntary unity of the proletariat and the peasants, or of a 'democratic' dictatorship, etc. When that comes we shall have to think about: a socialistic dictatorship of the proletariat." Which latter—the dictatorship of the proletariat—means we see "of Lenin" tout seul and his alien friends. In spite of his prognostication Lenin was only accurate with reference to his own motives and intentions, for the peasants and the great majority of the workmen are heartily in accord in loathing the commissaries of the People appointed by the self-styled "Government of Workmen and Peasants."