V. I.

Lenin

The Opening of the Second State Duma [1]

St. Petersburg. February 20, 1907.

The Second Duma meets today. The conditions it has been convened in, the
conditions, internal and external, during the elections, and the conditions it
will function in—all these are different from what they were for the First
Duma. Obviously, it would be a mistake to expect a simple repetition of
events. On the other hand, however, one essential feature is descernible in all
the changes that have taken place in the past year of constant political ups and
downs, namely that, on the whole, the movement has risen to a higher plane, that
for all its zigzag path it is persistently pressing ahead.

Inbrief, this essential feature may be described as follows: a shift to the
Right at the top, a shift to the Left at the bottom, and an accentuation of the
political extremes— and not only political, but also and above all social
and economic extremes. It is particularly characteristic of the events
immediately preceding the opening of the Second Duma that the seemingly
unruffled surface of political life has concealed a quiet, inconspicuous, but
deep-going process in the growth of understanding among the masses, both in the
working class and among the broadest sections of the peasantry.

Thoughthere has been little change in the constitution bolsted by military
courts in the past year, the political migration of the classes has been
tremendous. Take the Black Hundreds. At first they consisted mainly of a gang of
scoundrels in police service, with a small following recruited from the most
ignorant and deluded sections of the common people, often deliberately befuddled
with drink. Today the reactionary parties are headed by the Council of the
United Nobility. The feudal-minded landlords have closed their ranks and have become thoroughly “aware of themselves”
in the course of the revolution. The reactionary parties are becoming the class
organisation of those who will defend to the death the blessings most threatened
by the present revolution: the huge landed estates—that feudal
survival—the privileges of the highest estate, the opportunities they have
to influence affairs of state through personal connections with the
camarilla , etc.

Takethe Cadets. Of the frankly and patently bourgeois parties this party was
considered unquestionably the most “progressive”. How far to the
Right it has shifted! There is no longer any of last year’s vacillation
between reaction and the struggle of the people. This has yielded to frank
hatred for this struggle, a cynically outspoken ambition to put a stop to the
revolution, to settle down quietly, come to terms with reaction and begin to
build the cosy little nest—cosy for the landlord of capitalist inclinations
and for the manufacturer—of a monarchist constitution, a narrow,
mercenary, class constitution, one of ruthless severity towards the masses of
the people.

Itis now no longer possible to repeat the error so many people used to slip
into when they said that the Cadets stand to the Left of the Centre—that
the line of demarcation between the parties of freedom and the parties of
reaction lies to the Right of the Cadets. The Cadets are the Centre, and this
Centre is ever more openly working for a deal with the Right. As a result of the
political re alignment of classes, the Cadets now find their support in the
landlord whose estate is being run along capitalist lines, and in the broad
section of the bourgeoisie. The democratic, petty-bourgeois sections of the
population, however, are patently drawing away from the Cadets, following them
only by force of habit, from tradition, and at times simply because they have
been deceived.

Inthe countryside the main battle of the present revolution—the fight
against feudal survivals and landed proprietorship—is even fiercer and
more clear-cut. The Cadets’ non-democratic nature reveals itself much more
glaringly to the peasant than to the urban petty bourgeois. And the peasant has
turned his back on the Cadet with even greater finality. It was the peasant
electors, I would say, more than any others, who ousted the Cadets from the gubernia electoral
assemblies.

Theantagonism between peasant and landlord—the most deep-rooted and most
typical form of the antagonism between the people’s freedom and feudal
survivals in the bourgeois revolution—is not in the forefront in the
towns. The urban proletarian has already come to realise another and much more
profound conflict of interests, and this has given rise to a socialist
movement. Taken as a whole, the worker curias all over Russia, have returned
almost exclusively Social-Democratic electors, with only a scattering of
Socialist-Revolutionaries and an altogether negligible number of electors from
other parties. But even among the urban petty-bourgeois democrats the shift of
the lower stratum to the Left, away from the Cadets, is unmistakable. According
to figures published in Rech by a Cadet statistician, Mr. Smirnov, in
22 cities, with 153,000 voters voting on four election lists, the monarchists
received 17,000 votes, the Octobrists 34,000, the Left bloc 41,000, and
the Cadets 74,000. So enormous was the number of votes wrested from the Cadets
in the very first election contest— despite the tremendous power of the
Cadet daily press, the legal status of the Cadet organisation, the Cadet
falsehood about the danger of a Black-Hundred victory and despite the illegal
status of the Lefts—that there can be no doubt about the turn taken by the
shop-assistants, petty clerks, petty civil servants and poorer householders. The
Cadets will not be able to stand up to another such battle. Urban democracy has
abandoned them for the Trudoviks and the Social-Democrats.

Thewhole of the proletariat has mobilised, and the great mass of the democratic
petty bourgeoisie, especially the peasantry, are mobilising against the
Black-Hundred Council of the United Nobility and against the liberal
bourgeoisie, who have funked completely and turned tail on the revolution.

Thepolitical realignment of classes is so profound. so far-reaching, and so
mighty that no military courts, no Senate interpretations, no tricks of the
reactionaries, no spate of Cadet falsehood monopolising the columns of the
entire daily press—in fact, nothing at all has been able to prevent this realignment from being reflected in the Duma. The Second Duma
demonstrates the intensification of the profound, conscious, and increasingly
organised mass struggle between the various classes.

Thetask of the moment is to understand this basic fact, and to be able to
connect the various sections of the Duma with this mighty support from below. It
is not to the top, not to the government, that we must look, but to the depths,
to the people. It is not to the petty technical details of Duma procedure that
we must devote our attention; it is not vulgar considerations of how best to
lie low, of how to keep quiet in order to prevent the Duma from being dissolved,
in order not to anger Stolypin and Co.—it is not these vulgar Cadet
considerations that must interest the democrat. All his attention, all the
strength of his spirit, must be directed towards strengthening the transmission
belt which connects the big wheel that has begun to revolve energetically down
below with the little wheel up above.

Now,more than ever before, it is the duty of the Social-Democratic Party, as
the party of the most advanced class, to rise boldly to full stature, to speak
out independently, resolutely and courageously. If it is to further the
socialist and purely class alms of the proletariat, this Party must show it is
the vanguard of the entire democratic movement. True, we must dissociate ourselves
from all petty-bourgeois groups and strata—but not for the purpose of
secluding ourselves in supposedly splendid isolation (which would really mean
assisting the liberal bourgeois, trailing along in their wake), but for the
purpose of ridding ourselves of all vacillation, of all half-heartedness, for
the purpose of becoming the leader of the democratic peasantry.

Theprimary task of the Social-Democrats entering the Second Duma is to wrest
away from the liberals those democratic elements that are still under their
sway; to become the leader of those democrats; to teach them to seek support in
the people and join ranks, with the masses down below; to unfurl our own banner before the whole of the working class and before the entire
impoverished and famine-stricken peasant masses.

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Notes:
[1]
“The Opening of the Second State Duma” was published on February 20, 1907, as the leading article in the first issue of
Novy Luch .

Novy Luch ( New Ray )—a Bolshevik daily political and literary
newspaper published legally in St. Petersburg from February 20 to

February 27 (March 3-12), 1907, under Lenin’s editorship. The newspaper dealt
with the political life of the country and the working-class movement; it
sharply criticised the opportunist policy of the Mensheviks, exposed the
counter-revolutionary character of the liberal bourgeoisie and the
indecisiveness and wavering of the petty-bourgeois parties. Almost all issues of
Novy Luch contained articles by Lenin. The Bolshevik draft resolutions
for the Fifth Congress of the Party were published in Nos. 6 and 7 of Navy Luch on February 23 and 27, 1907.

Afterthe appearance. of No. 7, the newspaper was suppressed by the tsarist
government and legal action taken against its publishers.