"I've left behind my "narodnicism" which didn't last very long, my Tolstoyism too and now I'm closer to the social democrats, but I still stay away from political parties," Bunin wrote in the early 1910s. He said he realised now that the working class had become a force powerful enough to "overcome the whole of Western Europe," but warned against the possible negative effect of the Russian workers' lack of organisation, the one thing that made them different from their Western counterparts. He criticised the Russian intelligentsia for being ignorant of the common people's life, and spoke of a tragic schism between "the cultured people and the uncultured masses."