"Fundamentally our decrees on agricultural economy are correct. We have not the least occasion to disown or deplore any of them. But if these decrees in themselves are correct, then it is absolutely false to force them upon the peasants with violence. In not a single decree is there any question of this. They are conceived as guides, as -a summons to political activities."
But these words of Lenin could not prevent that the practical enforcement of these decrees meant the use of force against the peasants. That is what constitutes the difference between fine-polished theories and rough practice. Although the bolsheviks give the peasant question the greatest attention, well knowing that it is .a question of life and death for them, still the peasants repudiate with thanks the attention of the government. It cannot be denied that Lenin is right when he says that these decrees are fundamentally right. He should have added for us, but not for the peasants. The decree policy is in the interest of the state. It is, consequently, only the above mentioned anti-state parties who reject the decree policy in principle. But as the realization of socialism, communism and liberty is possible only through the abolition of the state, a change or improvement in the position of the peasants which would make them more satisfied, is attainable only in the anti-state direction. For these ideals cannot be banished from the efforts and the wishes of the people, not even by means of the article by Trotzky and Radek in which they try to inform the workers and the peasants that free labor is a bourgeois superstition. But the anti-state movement is characterized by the cancelling of all decrees. Along that road the soviet government is being pressed through the striving of the peasants for self-government and independence. These endeavors are also in harmony with the anti-state tendencies of the maximalists, the anarcho-syndicalists and also the social -revolutionaries of the left. // the endeavors and movements of the peassants and the tendencies of the anti-state socialists get a better footing and finally press fonvard to victory, then first will ^ the program of the social revolution have a chance of being realized. The peasants do not desire any state communism in which everything is accomplished by order from the top, they want commimal self-government, communalism, if you so want to call it, which means freedom to regulate their own affairs after their own desires and wishes. But this liberty they do not have under bolshevism, in spite of all well-meaning decrees. As long as this most important of questions, the peasant question, is not solved to the satisfaction o/ the peasants, we cannot consider even the first stage of the social revolution completed. First when this happens, the foundation is created for a peaceful development upward of social life. Under the present conditions, created by the bolsheviks, the suppression of one layer of the people, or class, by the other is still a living fact, carrying with it armed, violent uprisings. Under the rule of the bolsheviks the Russian revolution has not solved the peasant question but only complicated i1 still more. But that should not cause us to be astonished, for th< bolshevik party is a Marxist, a city-proletarian party, and it i; natural that the conquest of the state through a part of the citj proletariat — in which the peasants have no part — cannot brin^ them liberation. The emancipation of the peasants can be accomplished only by the peasants themselves. Without doubt the social-revolutionaries of the left or the maximalists would, a* peasant parties, have dealt with the question with more understanding than the bolsheviks. The latter are the least fit to solve the peasant question along socialist lines.
The City and Industry
The Development of the Unions