Lenin and Trotsky recognized peasant class struggle and its revolutionary potential

Evidence

Lenin and Trotsky, coming from Tsarist Russia, a society dominated by a peasant-subsistence or “backward” economy, saw the peasantry differently from Marx or Engels. In the central and western Russian countryside at the end of the nineteenth century, the remnants of Russian “feudalism” were to be found in the aristocracy and the poor peasantry. There were, too, the kulaks consisting of a rural bourgeoisie supported by capitalist agriculture, and a middle peasantry essentially locked into modified forms of subsistence agriculture. The roving peasantry, the rural proletariat, according to Lenin, emerged from the poor peasants who worked either for the kulaks, the landlords or some exceptional middle peasants. Both Lenin and Trotsky agreed that the rural relations of production were subject to “internal” antagonisms of class struggle (kulaks versus poor peasants) and, most importantly, that the peasantry could be an ally to the working-class movement. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1101