First of all came the imperfect development, the lack of enlightenment, the timidity, of the backward strata of the urban population and still more of the rural population. The vanguard, which consists of the bold spirits, of those who are active in body and in mind, of those who are well informed, constitutes a comparatively thin stratum. The others are very slow to move. A great many are still afraid to put their hands to the plough; a great many are still ignorant of their own rights, and have not yet realised that they are the masters of the country. This is not difficult to understand. The masses have been oppressed and enslaved for centuries; it is impossible that from their half-savage condition they should in a moment rise to a level at which they can govern the country. Those who first come to the front are those who belong to the most highly developed stratum; the workers of Petrograd, for instance. These we encounter everywhere. We find them as army commissars, as organisers of production, as executive committee delegates in the rural districts, as propagandists, as members of the highest soviet institutions, as teachers. By degrees even the backward masses are leavened; they cast the old things aside; they assimilate the new; little by little they teach themselves. It is, however, obvious that the low level of general culture must be a great hindrance to progress.
Secondly we had the lack of experience in the work of administration. This is manifest even in the best of the comrades. The working class has for the first time taken power into its hands. It has never done any administrative work, and no one has ever taught it how to do anything of the kind. On the contrary, for decades during the tsarist regime, and also during the brief Guchkov-Kerensky administration, everything that was possible was done to prevent the proletariat from getting any such experience. Both the bourgeois and the feudalist State were organisations for keeping the workers down, not organisations for educating them. Naturally, therefore, the workers, having risen to power, will, while learning by experience, make a great many mistakes. By these mistakes they learn, but inevitably they make them.