HistoryPorn

I disagree with this assessment. Marx identifies the peasantry with a different set of material conditions, and the mindset to match. It's not just that the peasantry were less organized or had less resources, but that their way of life was, fundamentally, different than that of wage laborers. The core of a socialist revolution must be the proletariat, in direction, in bases of power, in, well, class interests. The proletariat is very far divorced from the peasantry - they share only that they're oppressed and poor.

And they did, towards the end of their lives, start speculating that the Russian peasantry in particular was capable of revolutionary action, and they were even proved right, unless you argue that the defecting soldiers raised from the peasantry didn’t really count as peasants anymore.

When Marx mused on the lack of revolutionary potential in the peasantry, he didn't mean that they were incapable of fighting with or joining the revolution, or of having leaders within the revolution. Indeed, he notes that a revolution of the proletariat will appeal to the peasantry to some degree with the common cause in class conflict with the bourgeoisie. But ultimately they are in class conflict with one another as well. He identifies both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat as the products of an urban society (or rather, the proletariat the product of an urban society created by the bourgeosie) in contrast to the rural societies of peasants and lords which we casually refer to as feudalism.

The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance, they are revolutionary, they are only so in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat.

Marx and Engels both believed, correctly, in my opinion, that Russia was not ready for a revolution, and that the peasantry would not be the major factor in any successful socialist revolution. A successful socialist revolution is, necessarily, according to Marx, based on material conditions, not ideals or desires. An individual has ideals. A class has interests. Class consciousness is necessarily getting them to realize their own collective interests, not simply a propagation of ideology.

Russia's socialist revolution unraveled almost as soon as it began - the workers' soviets lost independent power as the need to bludgeon the peasantry back in line heightened over the course of the Russian civil war, and then, during the early years of the Soviet Union. The Party apparatus became supreme, in practice. The Soviet Union, in practical, material terms, was a kind of despotism, a feudal regime with modern trappings and socialist rhetoric.