its agrarian policy. In its turn it can expect nothing from the Soviet Power but a pitiless struggle against its counter-revolutionary activities. The Soviet Power may eventually be compelled to undertake a deliberately planned expropriation of the rich peasants, mobilising them for social work, and above all for the task of improving peasant land and the land of the soviet farms.
The middle peasants form the great majority of the Russian peasants. These middle peasants secured their share of the landlords’ estates with the aid of the urban proletariat, and only with its aid can they retain their grip upon this land in face of the counter-revolutionary movement on the part of the capitalists and the great landlords. Only in alliance with the proletariat, only under the leadership of the proletariat, only through the frank acceptance of this leadership, can the middle peasants save themselves from the onslaughts of world capitalism, from being plundered by the imperialists, from having to pay the vast debts incurred by the tsar and the Provisional Government. The system of petty agriculture is in any case doomed. It must inevitably be replaced by a more advantageous and more productive system, by the system of large-scale cooperative agriculture. Only through an alliance between the socialist proletariat and the middle peasants can this transformation be achieved without poverty, ruin, and incredible torment for the latter.