socialism until the course of capitalistic development will raise it to a majority of the population or of seizing the powers of government by an uprising of an armed minority, and establishing a dictatorship which does not need the support of the majority of the voters.
This quotation is from the Socialist Review, April, 1921.
Indeed a thoroughly anti-democratic conception ruled Soviet Russia from the beginning. Without quoting at length from the Soviet constitution on this point, we can with equal effect and more brevity cite the following from a resolution of the Eighth Communist Congress, held March 18–23, 1919:
The Russian Communist Party, developing the concrete aims of the dictatorship of the proletariat with reference to Russia, the chief characteristic of which is that the majority of the population consists of petty bourgeoisie, defines these aims as follows:
The urban proletariat … played the part of leader in the revolution. … Our Soviet constitution reflects that in certain privileges it confers upon the industrial proletariat in comparison with the more scattered petty-bourgeois mass in the village [i.e. the bulk of the agriculturists].
By the spring of 1920 Lenin had already thrown over the democratic idea, together with all hope of gaining the support of the peasants within the next twenty-five or fifty years, for he said at the Trade Union Congress in April:
