revolution is to put an end to the existence of a bourgeois or exploiting class, not merely to make it powerless. If exploitation is destroyed then there can be no class of exploiters, and the present exclusion of the bourgeoisie from government is merely a means of hastening and rendering less painful the transition of the bourgeois from his parasitic position to the more honorable position of equality with his fellow-workers. Once the conditions of parasitism, privilege and exploitation have been destroyed, the old divisions of the class-struggle will have automatically disappeared.
By the nature of things it has so happened that practically all the foreign observers of events in Russia have belonged to the privileged in their respective countries, and have been accustomed to associate with the privileged classes in Russia. They have consequently found it difficult to escape from their class in judging the story happening before their eyes. Those working-men sent from the Allied countries, less with the idea of studying the revolution than of telling it to do what the Allies wanted, have also been men especially chosen and deprived by their very mandates of the clear eyes and open mind they should have had. Socialists especially who had long dreamed of revolution found it particularly difficult to recognize in this cloudy tremendous struggle the thing which their dreams had softened. Nothing has been more remarkable or less surprising than the fact that of all the observers sent here from abroad those men have seen the thing clearest who by their upbringing and standards of life have been furthest from the revolutionary movement.
I do not propose to recapitulate the whole program of the Soviet Government, or to spend minutes, of which I have so few, in discussing in detail their efforts towards an equitable land settlement, their extraordinarily interesting work in building up, under the stress of famine and of war, an economic and industrial organization which shall facilitate the eventual socialization of Russia. This is material for many letters, and here I have not time for one. I therefore take the two events which have been most misused in blackening the Soviet Government to those who should have been its friends. These were the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, and the negotiations which ended, temporarily at least, in a separate peace between Russia and the Central
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