The peasantry was conservative and pro-tsar in general, as plenty of narodniki found out when the farmers they were trying to win over to revolution instead decided to denounce them to the police.
The feature of the "environment" relevant to comparing Marx and Lenin is peasant self-consciousness. This characterizes not only the 85% or so of the 1917 Russian population actually living in peasant conditions but also a substantial part of the "proletariat," namely the part made up of peasants ("the peasant proprietor does not belong to the proletariat, and even where his condition is proletarian, he believes himself not to
Ted
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