De Tocqueville, in explaining the origin of the French Revolution, lays emphasis on the equality of condition, education and manners which had existed between the nobility and the Third Estate, and the galling inequality of rights. The result was the political revolution of 1789. The present social revolution in Russia is the outcome of a similar contrast. There is hardly a country in Europe where the equality of men is as real as in Russia, and where the economic contrast of classes is equally acute. France has her small rentiers and her conservative peasantry; England her well-to-do artisans, her office clerks and shop-assistants; Russia posseses practically none of these types in any considerable numbers. The peasant-holding in Russia is not a fixed, economically sufficient unit, like a farm in England or France, or a Bauernhof in Germany, but a strip of land in the open fields. By subdivision among heirs this strip has been reduced below the minimum which, under the present backward system of tillage, could satisfy the needs of its owner. He therefore cries out for more land, for “a new lot” to be got by breaking up the big landed estates. There is hardly another social type, except perhaps the miner, which has an equally strong consciousness of its separate individuality as the peasant. The peasants were actuated by class-consciousness ages before anyone discussed the matter. Peasant revolts, jacqueries, and Bauernbündlereien are the oldest form of class warfare; and conditions have made the Russian peasant into a revolutionary proletarian. In the Russia towns, on the other hand, work which in English offices is done by unskilled experts in the art of writing and counting without understanding anything of what they do, is performed by men of a very different mental calibre. There is the poor intelligentsia, men who in education and outlook are as much the equals of the biggest bourgeoisie as the bourgeois of pre-revolutionary France were of her nobility. But that intelligentsia consists largely of proletarians. The absence of them in England accounts for the mental poverty of our labour movements, their presence in Russia for the acute consciousness of the social conflict. Russia is rent between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, and the present Revolution is mainly social.
[See also: Britain, Russia and the Cold War]
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