Although this power base may have been small in ratio to the total population; it existed in the nerve centers of Russia among a key element in the population. There is a real interesting analysis of this by a woman(whose name I can never remember) who teaches at Oberlin College entitled Forging Revolution. There are also some memoirs of early Russian union guys that are also worth reading---the Bolsheviks were the party of the industrial workers and they made the Bolsheviks---some of this stuff is obscure and hard to find because it went against later dogma. Shylapnikov's(sp) memoirs(1923) are good on this point; so are the memoirs of the first commandant of the Kremlin(1960's).
When you get into the late 1920's what I see is a forced attempt to increase the size of the industrial working class at the expense of the small farmers and the then relatively pampered industrial workers. That might make good Marxist sense, but, poor common sense.
Your email pal,
Tom L.
Barbara Laurence wrote:
> Isn't it true that in Marx and Engels, the proletariat makes the
> revolution, while in Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, the revolution makes the
> proletariat?
> Jim O'Connor
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