Whereas bourgeois democracy, in spite of its professions to the contrary, made of the army a tool of the well-to-do classes, detaching it from the working masses and setting it up against them, making it impossible or difficult for the soldier to exercise his political rights, the Soviet State brings the workers and the soldiers together in its organs, the soviets, in which they have equal rights and identical interests. It is the task of our party to safeguard and promote this union of the workers and the soldiers in the soviets, and to strengthen the indissoluble unity of the armed forces with the organisations of the proletariat and semi-proletariat.[§52.]
The industrial urban proletariat, comprising that portion of the toiling masses which is most highly concentrated, most united, most enlightened, and most perfectly tempered for the struggle, must be the leader in all revolutions. From the first, the proletariat assumed this role in the soviets, and has continued to play the leading part throughout their development into organs of power. Our Soviet Constitution reflects this, by assigning certain preferential rights to the industrial proletariat, as compared with the comparatively disunited petty-bourgeois masses in the villages.
Recognising the temporary character of these privileges, which are historically dependent upon the difficulty of effecting the socialist organisation of the villages, the Russian Communist Party must do its utmost, unerringly and systematically, to make a good use of this situation of the industrial proletariat. As a counterpoise to the narrow trade and craft interests which capitalism promoted among the workers, our party must effect a closer union between the vanguard of the workers, on the one hand, and the comparatively backward and disintegrated masses of the rural proletariat and semi-proletariat, together with the middle peasants, on the other.[§53.]