VI

The Bolshevik government of Russia is credited by many of its admirers in this country with having solved the great land problem and with having satisfied the land-hunger of the peasants.  It is charged, moreover, that the bitter opposition to the Bolsheviki is mainly due to agitation by the bourgeoisie, led by the expropriated landowners, who want to defeat the Revolution and to have their former titles to the land restored.  Of course, it is true that, so far as they dare to do so, the former landowners actively oppose the Bolsheviki.  No expropriated class ever acted otherwise, and it would be foolish to expect anything else.  But any person who believes that the opposition of the great peasant Socialist organizations, and especially of the Socialist-Revolutionists, is due to the confiscation of the land, either consciously or unconsciously, is capable of believing anything and quite immune from rationality.

The facts in the case are, briefly, as follows:  First, as Professor Ross has pointed out,[77] the land policy of the Bolshevik government was a compromise of the principles long advocated by its leaders, a compromise made for political reasons only.  Second, as Marie Spiridonova abundantly demonstrated at an All-Russian Soviet Conference in July, 1918, the Bolshevik government did not honorably live up to its agreement with the Socialist-Revolutionists of the Left.  Third, so far as the land problem was concerned there was not the slightest need or justification for the Bolshevik coup d’etat, for the reason that the problem had already been solved on the precise lines afterward followed in the Soviet decree and the leaders of the peasants were satisfied.  We have the authority of no less competent a witness than Litvinov, Bolshevist Minister to England, that “the land measure had been ‘lifted’ bodily from the program of the Socialist-Revolutionists."[78] Each of these statements is amply sustained by evidence which cannot be disputed or overcome.

That the “land decree” which the Bolshevik government promulgated was a compromise with their long-cherished principles admits of no doubt whatever.  Every one who has kept informed concerning Russian revolutionary movements during the past twenty or twenty-five years knows that during all that time one of the principal subjects of controversy among Socialists was the land question and the proper method of solving it.  The “Narodniki,” or peasant Socialists, later organized into the Socialist-Revolutionary party, wanted distribution of the land belonging to the big estates among the peasant communes, to be co-operatively owned and managed.  They did not want land nationalization, which was the program of the Marxists—­the Social Democrats.  This latter program meant that, instead of the land being divided among the peasants’ communal organizations, it should be owned, used, and managed by the state, the principles of large-scale production and wage labor being applied to agriculture in the same manner as to industry.