The Bolsheviks were relatively weak in the countryside among the peasantry. They had always been in the cities; they spent most of their existence underground and going out into the country had been hard for them. They were mainly a workers’ party, but the peasants made up a huge majority of the population. The SRs (Socialist Revolutionaries) were the main party in the countryside. The relationship between the peasants (farmers and agricultural workers) to the workers in the cities was a key issue. Based on an analysis, for a long time, the Bolsheviks distinguished between the rich peasants, called “kulaks” in Russian, the middle peasants, the poor peasants and agricultural laborers. The kulaks employed labor, exploited labor and owned large plots of land. The middle peasants owned land and basically had enough to live on. And the poor peasants, the majority, lived on plots of land inherited from feudalism that were too small to live on. They were constantly going under, starving to death, had their children starve and lived in destitute. Agricultural laborers were a growing sector in the countryside. They were poor peasants who had lost their land altogether and were really proletarians in the countryside. The Bolsheviks distinguished between these different layers and their strategy was to fight the kulaks, neutralize the middle strata, and win over the poor peasants and agricultural laborers. Even though they were not supposed to be the peasant party, the Bolsheviks were the only ones who, all through the revolution, from the beginning, openly supported the peasants’ seizing the big estates without compensation. Even the SRs took a position against the land seizures, stating that they would have to wait until there is a constituent assembly, draw up the proper legislation and assure the land owners of how much they would be compensated. The Bolshevik stated that it was the right of the poor peasants to take the land, the big estates. But the SR leadership, while claiming to represent all the peasants, really represented the interests of the better off layers – the capitalist farmers and aspiring capitalist farmers. Read the full article: https://liberationschool.org/milestones-in-communist-history-the-october-revolution/3/