The Bolshevik dictatorship was not an utter accident, of course. Russia’s political landscape had become decisively socialist, as we have seen. The right-wing ranks of the army and officer corps were weaker in Russia than in every other predominantly peasant country, and unlike everywhere else, Russia lacked a non-socialist peasants’ party, a circumstance partly derived from the intransigence and sheer daftness of the old rightist establishment on the land question.
