Similar distrust, only upon a much bigger scale, explains the fight for and against the Constituent Assembly.  Lenine and his followers distrusted the peasants as a class whose interests were akin to the class of small property-owners.  He would only unite with the poor, propertyless peasants.  The leaders of the peasantry, on the other hand, supported by the more liberal Marxians, would expand the meaning of the term “working class” and embrace within its meaning all the peasants as well as all city workers, most of the professional classes, and so on.  We can get some idea of this strife from a criticism which Lenine directs against the Mensheviki: 

In its class composition this party is not Socialist at all.  It does not represent the toiling masses.  It represents fairly prosperous peasants and working-men, petty traders, many small and some even fairly large capitalists, and a certain number of real but gullible proletarians who have been caught in the bourgeois net.[36]

It is clear from this criticism that Lenine does not believe that a genuine Socialist party—­and, presumably, therefore, the same must apply to a Socialist government—­can represent “fairly prosperous peasants and working-men.”  We now know how to appraise the Soviet government.  The constitution of Russia under the rule of the Bolsheviki is required by law to be posted in all public places in Russia.  In Article II, Chapter V, paragraph 9, of this document it is set forth that “the Constitution of the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic involves, in view of the present transition period, the establishment of a dictatorship of the urban and rural proletariat and the poorest peasantry in the form of a powerful All-Russian Soviet authority.”  Attention is called to this passage here, not for the sake of pointing out the obvious need for some exact definition of the loose expression, “the poorest peasantry,” nor for the sake of any captious criticism, but solely to point out the important fact that Lenine only admits a part of the peasantry—­the poorest—­to share in the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Turning to another part of the same important document—­Article III, Chapter VI, Section A, paragraph 25—­we find the basis of representation in the All-Russian Congress of Soviets stated.  There are representatives of town Soviets and representatives of provincial congresses of Soviets.  The former represent the industrial workers; the latter represent the peasants almost exclusively.  It is important, therefore, to note that there is one delegate for every twenty-five thousand city voters and one for every one hundred and twenty-five thousand peasant voters!  In Section B of the same Article, Chapter X, paragraph 53, we find the same discrimination:  it takes five peasants’ votes to equal the vote of one city voter; it was this general attitude of the Bolsheviki toward the peasants, dividing them into classes and treating the great majority of them as petty, rural bourgeoisie, which roused the resentment of the peasants’ leaders.  They naturally insisted that the peasants constituted a distinct class, co-operating with the proletariat, not to be ruled by it.  Even Marie Spiridonova, who at first joined with the Bolsheviki, was compelled, later on, to assert this point of view.