Leon Trotsky: 1905

Leon Trotsky: 1905: CHAPTER 4 -- The Driving Forces of the Russian Revolution
In 1897, the proletariat, including dependent family members, comprised 27.6 per cent of the total
population, that is, slightly over one-quarter. The degree of political activity of separate strata within this
mass of workers varies considerably, the leading role in the revolution being held almost exclusively by
workers in group A in the table above. It would, however, be a most flagrant error to measure the real
and potential significance of the Russian proletariat by its relative proportion within the population as a
whole. To do so would be to fail to see the social relations concealed behind the figures.
The influence of the proletariat is determined by its role in the modern economy. The nation's most
powerful means of production depend directly on the workers. Not less than half the nation's annual
income is produced by 3.3 million workers (group A). The railways, our most important means of
transport, which alone are able to convert our vast country into an economic whole, represent -- as events
have shown -- an economic and political factor of the utmost importance in the hands of the proletariat.
To this we should add the postal services and the telegraph, whose dependence on the proletariat is less
direct but nonetheless very real.
While the peasantry is scattered over the entire countryside, the proletariat is concentrated in large
masses in the factories and industrial centers. It forms the nucleus of the population of every town of any
economic or political importance, and all the advantages of the town in a capitalist country --
concentration of the productive forces, the means of production, the most active elements of the
population, and the greatest cultural benefits -- are naturally transformed into class advantages for the
prole tariat. Its self-determination as a class has developed with a rapidity unequaled in previous history.
Scarcely emerged from the cradle, the Russian proletariat found itself faced with the most concentrated
state power and the equally concentrated power of capital. Craft prejudices and guild traditions had no
power whatsoever over its consciousness. From its first steps it entered upon the path of irreconcilable
class struggle.
In this way the negligible role of artisanal crafts in Russia and of minor industry in general, together with
the exception ally developed state of Russia's large-scale industry, have led in politics to the
displacement of bourgeois democracy by proletarian democracy. Together with its productive functions,
the proletariat has taken over the petty bourgeoisie's historical role as played in previous revolutions, and
also its historical claims to leadership over the peasant masses during the epoch of their emancipation, as
an estate, from the yoke of the nobility and the state fiscal organization.
The agrarian problem proved to be the political touchstone by which history put the urban political
parties to the test.
The Nobility and Landowners
The Kadet (or, rather, former Kadet) program of enforced expropriation of large and medium
landholdings on the basis of "lust assessments" represents, in the Kadets' view, the maximum of what can
be achieved by means of "creative legislative effort." But in reality the liberals' attempt to expropriate the
large landed estates by legislative means led only to the government's denial of electoral rights and to the
coup d'état of June 3, 1907. The Kadets viewed the liquidation of the landowning nobility as a purely
financial operation, trying conscientiously to make their "just assessment" as acceptable as possible to the
landowners. But the nobility took a very different view of the matter. With its infallible instinct it
realized at once that what was at stake was not simply the sale of 50 million dessyatins, even at high
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