LENIN AND THE BOLSHEVIKS.

Auckland Star, Volume XLIX, Issue 48, 25 February 1918, Page 4

LENIN AND THE BOLSHEVIKS.

Xicolai Lenin, the leader in the movement that is leading Russia to a humiliation without parallel in history, made his first appearance in Russian public life some twenty-two years ago, when he took up an attitude of fierce opposition to the Narodniki, or Popui liflts, who were engaged in an endeavour jto improve the lot of the Russian peasant. The Xarodniki saw in the Russian village community and in the team-work of Russian artisans' bands the nuclei of a new economic order i based on equality and justice. They laid great stress on all work that tended to educate and enlighten the I rural population and improve the communal ownership of land. The artisane'i bands were to be something like our] trade unions, except that they were to' tender for different kinds of work and : j share the proceeds equally amongst themselves. The programme was con-i structive, and aimed essentially at up-j lifting both the peasant and the worker.! To Lenin this was anathema. In his Book, "What Is There To Be Done?"j published in 1902, he bitterly denounce/jj the Narodniki as the enemy of thai working man, and he described their. scheme as "an injurious bourgeois undertaking." A curious feature of thisi book is the contempt Lenin shows for the masses. "'The working men," he writes, "'can have no social-democratic consciousness of their own. This consciousness can be brought to them only from without.'" They need a dictator. In his earlier book, "The Development of Capitalism in Russia," published in ISO?), Lenin hntl criticised the efforts to improve the lot of the peasants on the ground that by means of these efforts some of the peasants had been able to accumulate land and capital, and had thus become an "agricultural bourgeoisie." Anything that tended to improve the lot of thr workers he denounced as an injurious bourgeois undertaking, "a strengthening of the inIlueiice of bourgeois ideology over the workmen." The workers might organise if they wished, but they were to be governed by a small central body, which was not to foe in any way responsible | to the organisation. The masses he, describes as mere clay for historical j structures. Lenin's doctrines are. ori were, the very antithesis of true demoe-| racy. Ho has, or had, no belief in majority I votes, and none whatever in the ability i of the masses to govern themselves.] After the manner of the Roman patricians, he throws sops to the mob. The. soldiers are tired of fighting, then let! them stop fighting if they want to. If: the peasants want more land, let them' take it from those who already possess! it. He has no constructive programme,] nor does he desrre one. He sees himself as a second Napoleon, rising to the fullest heights of autocratic power on the j ruins of 0,1 l constitutional government.! The Russia'i revolution was a revolu-, tion of all the classes, groupe, creeds,! nationalities in Russia to overthrow, j the bureaucracy which had betrayed the i , country. Lenin set himself to undoi the work of the revolution, to pave the way for an oligarchy of extremists ruling by means of the basest, passions of an iixieducat.ed mob, and to betray the interests of liis country in his lust for personal power. Lenin has declared that he has no belief in the genius of the masses; he has characterised every kind of admiration for the Labour movement as "mere bourgeois ideology." He may yet find his contempt for democracy to be mistaken, and that the Russians, who have shaken off the slavery of Czardom, 'will be equally able to shake off the still "worse slavery of Leninism.