He argued that the Russian bourgeoisie was so thoroughly infected with the ills of the bureaucratic system that it was itself decadent; not virile and progressive as a class aiming to possess the future must be.  Since it was thus corrupted and weakened, and therefore incapable of fulfilling any revolutionary historical role, that became the immediate task of the proletariat.  Here was an example of the manner in which lifting over revolutionary steps was accomplished.  Of course, the peasantry was in a backward and even primitive state which unfitted it for the proletarian role.  Nevertheless, it had a class consciousness of its own, and an irresistible hunger for land.  Without this class supporting it, or, at least, acquiescing in its rule, the proletariat could never hope to seize and hold the power of government.  It would be possible to solve the difficulty here presented, Trotzky contended, if the enactment of the peasant program were permitted during the Revolution and accepted by the proletariat as a fait accompli.  This would satisfy the peasants and make them content to acquiesce in a proletarian dictatorship.  Once firmly established in power, it would be possible for the proletariat to gradually apply the true Socialist solution to the agrarian problem and to convert the peasants.  “Once in power, the proletariat will appear before the peasantry as its liberator,” he wrote.

His imagination fired by the manner in which the Soviet of which he was president held the loyalty of the masses during the revolutionary uprising, and the representative character it developed, Trotzky conceived the idea that it lent itself admirably to the scheme of proletarian dictatorship.  Parliamentary government cannot be used to impose and maintain a dictatorship, whether of autocracy or oligarchy, bourgeoisie or proletariat.  In the Soviet, as a result of six weeks’ experience in abnormal times, during which it was never for a moment subjected to the test of maintaining the economic life of the nation, Trotzky saw the ideal proletarian government.  He once described the Soviet as “a true, unadulterated democracy,” but, unless we are to dismiss the description as idle and vain rhetoric, we must assume that the word “democracy” was used in an entirely new sense, utterly incompatible with its etymological and historical meaning.  Democracy has always meant absence of class rule; proletarian dictatorship is class rule.

In the foregoing analysis of the theoretical and tactical views which Trotzky held during and immediately after the First Revolution, it is easy to see the genesis of the policies of the Bolshevik government which came twelve years later.  The intervening years served only to deepen his convictions.  At the center of all his thinking during that period was his belief in the sufficiency of the Soviet, and in the need of proletarian dictatorship.  Throwing aside the first cautious thought that these things arose from the peculiar conditions existing in Russia as a result of her retarded economic development, he had come to regard them as applicable to all nations and to all peoples, except, perhaps, the peoples still living in barbarism or savagery.