it. I hope the proletarian Party will really act in this manner."[1]
Here, in passing, another question is raised (or more correctly another phase of the same problem), viz., the question of the role of the peasantry in the proletarian revolution, the question as to whether the peasantry can still be utilised as a force capable of helping the revolution. The point of view of Kamenev is quite clear on this also: there can be no talk of a proletarian dictatorship marching side by side with the peasantry; there can be no dictatorship of the working class under which the proletariat could construct Socialism in conjunction with the peasantry and guide the peasantry in this work. For Kamenev, on the contrary, the capture of power by the proletariat, the point at which the proletariat commences the work of constructing Socialism, is precisely the point at which the proletariat breaks with the peasantry. Not alliance with the peasantry, but irreconcilable antagonism and struggle with the peasantry, is what Kamenev dreamed of at the beginning of the revolution.
Of course, this theoretical analysis of our revolution, this estimation of its driving forces and of the relations between the working class and the peasantry, the assertion that a bloc between the working class and the peasantry is impossible under the proletarian dictatorship, etc., wholly and completely determined the position of Kamenev and his friends at the outbreak of the October revolu-
- ↑ Speech by Kamenev at the Petrograd and All-Russian Conference of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (Bolshevik Section) 9th April, 1917, State Publishing Department, 1925, p. 52.
