The daily worker. [volume] (Chicago, Ill.) 1924-1958, 1924-02-16


the main obstacle in the way of any
kind of movement for freedom, not
only in Russia, but all over the world.
Czarism fell. And the February
revolution, closely bound up with the
great war, called upon the scene such
mighty forces from among the people
(above all from among the farmers,
as the army was a farmers ARMY
that the proletariat of the towns was
enabled to undertake tasks of a far
wider extent.
In the years 1905 and 1917 Boil
shevism took the farmers as it found
them. Neither in 1905 nor in 1917
did Bolshevism ignore the farmers.
And precisely here lay the funda-
mental power of Bolshevisn. impart-
ing it an inexhaustible force. Any
one who dreamed, in the year 1905,
of setting before the Russian farm
ers those tasks which they were
capable of coping with in the year
1917, after the imperialist world war
and after the February revolution,
would have been a Don Quixote.
Is it possible, for instance. to draw
any comparison between even the
French farmers of the pre-war period
and the French farmers after the
war? Even the French farmer chang
Cd entirely in many respects during
the war years, 1914 to 1918. Had
the slogan of the workers and farm
ers' government" for instance, been
proclaimed in France in the year
1910, 1T would have been nothing but
an empty phrase. And in the year
1928 it is an earnest revolutionary
deed And yet the transformation
undergone by the French farmers in
the period between 1914 and 1918
cannot be compared in the slightest
degree with that undergone by the
Russian farmers during the same
time, for the simple reason that
Frances agrarian revolution had al
ready taken pace several generations
before, and the agrarian question
could not play such an important role
in France, during the period from
1914 to 1913, as it did in Russia.
The farmer question has also been
the main bone of contention between
Bolshevism and the tendencies hostile
to it. This question has been the
cause of the profoundest differences
of opinion. Menshevism adopted the
line of the so-cal.ed "all-national op-
position" Menshevissn considered
that the low grade of culture pos
sessed by the farmers rendered them
incapable of any historical act what
ever. The Menshevist estimate of
the farmers has in actual fact been
highly ounterFevoiutionary and
domineering.
The fights of 1906 suppressed the
working class for a long period. The
farmers continued their uninterrupt-
ed slumbers.' The conclusion arrived
at by the Mensheviki from these
facts led them to a profoundly pressi-
mistic view as to the possibility of
any renewed revolution whatever:
and having thus renowned all revolu
tlonary prospects, Menshevism re-
garded 1T as its leading task to adapt
itself to the limitations of Stolli-
pins legality, and to create a real
European" Social Democratic Party.
This counter-revolutionary estimate
of the role of the farmers gave rise
to all that followed.
If the working class had been VIC
torious in the year 1905, the Men
sheviki would have been able to join
forces with it for a time. The prole-
tariat was defeated. And it is not
agreeable to unite ones fate with
the defeated, So thought and felt
many Menshevist social democratic
super-party and non-party groups of
the intelligenzia.
In the year 1905, at the moment
when the success of the revolutionary
proletaIiat had reached its highest
point, all of these intellectuals-fro
Minski TO Toffi, from the Kuskova to
the rich engineers of the "Union Of
Unions" attached themselves to the
proletariat. But in a trice all these
intelligenzia and would-be revolu-
tionists forsook the proletarian eman-
cipation movement.
The intelligenzia began To desert
the party and the revolutionary
movement wholesale, to boast Of nom
partisanship. 1t became the right
thing to find fault with the party.
The idea Of a nor-narfieoy, Uxyn,-lr ore,