phrase, "taxation in kind." The peasants, he recognizes, do not accept the proletarian dictatorship; still Lenin proposes to give them no voice whatever in the Communist Government. Undoubtedly such very restricted free trade as has been established means, to that small degree, a return to capitalism. By admitting the fact Lenin puts his critics off their guard. His defense of this decree before his own followers (above quoted) is that the remaining parts of the Communist system will be strengthened by this slight economic concession, since it is unaccompanied by any surrender of actual political power. As to his supposed concession about the impossibility of realizing Socialism in Russia now, the whole reason for the proletarian dictatorship, as we have pointed out, is precisely that violence will be needed to hold the power over the peasant majority—until in a generation or two, Socialism does become feasible. Not only have the Communists always used this argument but they have never used any other. Because the country is not ready for Communism, the dictatorship of the Communists must be prolonged—indefinitely until it is ready.
In his closing speech at the March (1921) Congress of the Russian Communist Party—reproduced in Soviet Russia, May 14th, 1921—Lenin again laid bare in a few words his entire policy towards the agricultural population (peasants) who compose the overwhelming majority of the nation. The inauguration of the law of "taxation in kind," or, rather, the reversion to that law, it will be observed, had made no change whatever in the Bolshevist attitude towards the subjected peasantry. Lenin said:
