fident was he of his capacity to win that support that he even had the courage to make democracy fundamental in the Communist doctrine as he formulated it at that time. This may be seen in his report to the Communist Congress in March, 1919—a report accepted, like all of Lenin's, by the Congress. In this report, reproduced in the Petrograd Pravda of March 8, 1919, we read:
That which definitely distinguishes a dictatorship of the proletariat from a dictatorship of other classes, from a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie in all the civilized capitalist countries, is that the dictatorship of the landlords and of the bourgeoisie was the forcible suppression of the resistance of the overwhelming majority of the population, namely, the toilers. On the other hand, the dictatorship of the proletariat is the forcible suppression of the resistance of the exploiters, that is, of an insignificant minority of the population—of landlords and capitalists.
It therefore follows that a dictatorship of the proletariat must necessarily carry with it not only changes in the form and institutions of democracy, speaking in general terms, but specifically such a change as would secure an extension such as has never been seen in the history of the world of the actual use of democratism by the toiling classes.
And in actual fact the form of dictatorship of the proletariat which has already been worked out in practice, that is, the Soviet authority in Russia, the Räte system in Germany, the shop stewards' committees, and other similar Soviet institutions in other countries, all represent and realize for the toiling classes, that is, for the overwhelming majority of the population, this actual possibility to use democratic rights and freedoms, which possibility never existed, even approximately, in the very best and most democratic bourgeois republics.
