ABSTRACT
Lenin's state was to be a Bolshevik state supported by workers and peasants. As the privileged classes could not be expected to support it, it was necessary to disfranchise them and thus end bourgeois democracy. Once in power, the Bolsheviks restricted political freedoms—freedom of speech, press, assembly, and association, and the right to vote and to be elected to the soviets—to the laboring population, that is, to all people "who have acquired the means of living through labor that is productive and useful to society, that is, the laborers and employees of all classes who are employed in industry, trade, agriculture, etc., and to peasants and Cossack agricultural laborers who employ no help for purposes of making profits." 1 However, the peasants could not be integrated into the envisioned "one great factory," which transformed "all citizens into the hired employees of the state," for they had made their revolution for "private property," for land of their own, disregarding the fact that nominally all land belonged to the nation as a whole. The concessions made to the peasants were the price the Bolsheviks had to pay for their support. "The Russian peasantry," wrote Trotsky, "will be interested in upholding proletarian rule at least in the first, most difficult, period, no less than were the French peasants interested in upholding the military role of Napoleon Bonaparte, who by force guaranteed to the new owners the integrity of their land shares." 2
