The workers’ party may succeed against the upper middle class and what remains of the feudal element, but it will be attacked on its flank by the democracy.  We can perhaps give an anti-bourgeois tone to the Revolution for a little while, we can destroy the essential conditions of bourgeois production; but we cannot possibly put down the small tradesmen and shopkeeping class, the petty bourgeoisie.  My motto is to secure all we can get.  We should prevent the lower and middle class from forming any organizations for as long a time as possible after the first victory, and especially oppose ourselves in serried ranks to the plan of calling a Constitutional Assembly.  Partial terrorism, local anarchy, must replace for us what we lack in bulk.

What a remarkable anticipation of the Bolshevist methods of 1917-18 is thus outlined in this letter, written sixty-seven years before the Bolshevik coup d’etat! How literally Lenine, Trotzky and Co. have followed Herr von Miquel!  They have desperately tried to “give an anti-bourgeois tone to the Revolution,” denouncing as bourgeois reactionaries the men and women whose labors and sacrifices have made the Russian Socialist movement.  They have destroyed “the essential conditions” of bourgeois and of any other than the most primitive production.  They have set themselves in serried ranks in opposition to “the plan of calling a Constitutional Assembly.”  They have suppressed not only the organizations of the “lower and middle class,” but also those of a great part of the working class, thus going beyond Miquel.  Finally, to replace what they lack in bulk, they have resorted to “partial terrorism and local anarchy.”

And it is in the name of revolutionary progress, of ultra-radicalism, that we are called upon to revert to the tactics of desperation born of the discouraging conditions of nearly seventy years ago.  A new philosophy has taken possession of the easily possessed minds of Greenwich Village philosophers and parlor revolutionists—­a new philosophy of progress, according to which revolutionary progress consists in the unraveling by feverish fingers of the fabric woven through years of sacrifice; in abandoning high levels attained for the lower levels from which the struggles of the past raised us; in harking back to the thoughts and the tactics of men who shouted their despairing, defiant cries into the gloom of the blackest period of the nineteenth century!

Universal, secret, equal, and direct suffrage was a fact in Russia, the first great achievement of the Revolution.  Upon that foundation, and upon no other, it was possible to build an enduring, comprehensive social democracy.  Against that foundation the Bolsheviki hurled their destructive power, creating a discriminating class suffrage, disfranchising a great part of the Russian people—­not merely the bourgeoisie, but a considerable part of the working class itself.  Chapter XIII of Article 4 of the Constitution of the “Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic” sets forth the qualifications for voting, as follows: