When democracy is abolished, parliamentary government goes with it.  From the first days after his return to Russia Lenine advocated, instead of a parliamentary republic similar to that of France or the United States, what he called a Soviet republic, which would be formed upon these lines:  local government would be carried on by local Soviets composed of delegates elected by “the working class and the poorest peasantry,” to use a common Bolshevik phrase which bothers a great many people whose minds insist upon classifying peasants as “working-people” and part of the working class.  What Lenine means when he uses the phrase, and what Litvinov means[15] is that the industrial wage-workers—­to whom is applied the term “working class”—­must be sharply distinguished from peasants and small farmers, though the very poorest peasants, not being conservative, as more prosperous peasants are, can be united with the wage-workers.

These local Soviets functioning in local government would, in Lenine’s Soviet republic, elect delegates to a central committee of all the Soviets in the country, and that central committee would be the state.  Except in details of organization, this is not materially different from the fundamental idea of the I.W.W. with which we are familiar.[16] According to the latter, the labor-unions, organized on industrial lines and federated through a central council, will take the place of parliamentary government elected on territorial lines.  According to the Bolshevik plan, Soviets would take the place held by the unions in the plan of the I.W.W.  It is not to be wondered at that, in the words of Litvinov, Lenine’s own closest friends shrank from his scheme and Lenine “was compelled to drop it for a time.”

V

Bolshevism was greatly strengthened in its leadership by the return of Leon Trotzky, who arrived in Petrograd on May 17th.  Trotzky was born in Moscow about forty-five years ago.  Like Lenine, he is of bourgeois origin, his father being a wealthy Moscow merchant.  He is a Jew and his real name is Bronstein.  To live under an assumed name has always been a common practice among Russian revolutionists, for very good and cogent reasons.  Certainly all who knew anything at all of the personnel of the Russian revolutionary movement during the past twenty years knew that Trotzky was Bronstein, and that he was a Jew.  The idea, assiduously disseminated by a section of the American press, that there must be something discreditable or mysterious connected with his adoption of an alias is extremely absurd, and can only be explained by monumental ignorance of Russian revolutionary history.