V. I.

Lenin

Comradeworkers, and all citizens of Russia! The Duma elections are
approaching. The Social-Democratic Party, the party of the working class, calls
upon you all to take part in the elections and so help to rally the forces that
are really capable of fighting for freedom.

Inour revolution the mass of the people are fighting against the rule of the
government officials and the police, the landlords and the capitalists, and
first and foremost against the autocratic tsarist government. The masses are
fighting for land and liberty, for the overthrow of the gang of pogrom-mongers
and executioners, who reply to the demands of millions and scores of millions of
people by bribery, deception, brutal violence, imprisonment and military
courts.

Bytheir strike in October 1905, the workers of all Russia wrung from the tsar a
promise of liberty and of a Duma with legislative powers. The tsarist government
broke these promises. The electoral law curtailed the rights of the peasants
and workers for the benefit of the landlords and capitalists. The powers of the
Duma itself were reduced almost to nil. But even that is not the main thing. The
main thing is that all these liberties and rights remained a dead letter, for
real authority, real power remained as before wholly in the hands of the tsarist
government. No Duma can or will give the people land and liberty as long as real
power remains in the hands of the pogrom-mongers and throttlers of liberty.

Thisis why the revolutionary workers, together with the majority of the
conscious fighters for liberty in other sections of the population, boycotted
the Duma. The boycott of the Duma was an attempt to take the convocation of the
people’s representatives out of the hands of the pogrom-mongers. The boycott
of the Duma was a warning to the people not to believe in scraps of paper; it
was a call to fight for real power. The boycott failed, because the liberal bourgeoisie betrayed the
cause of liberty. The Cadets—the party of “people’s” freedom,
that party of liberal landlords and “en lightened” bourgeois
windbags—turned their backs on the heroic struggle of the proletariat,
described as folly the risings of the peasantry and of the best units of the
armed forces, and took part in the elections organised by the
pogrom-mongers. Thanks to the treachery of the Cadet bourgeoisie, the
whole people must reckon for a time with laws and elections which the pogrom-mongers have
organised, which the pogrom-mongers have falsified and which the pogrom-mongers
have converted into a mockery of the people.

Intaking part in the elections now, however, we can and must open the eyes of
the people to the necessity of a struggle for power, to the futility of the
Cadets’ playing at constitutions. Citizens of all Russia! Reflect on the
lessons that the First Duma has taught us!

Thefighters for liberty and for land for the peasants were killed, exiled or
imprisoned. The Cadets had a majority in the Duma. These liberal bourgeois were
afraid of the struggle, were afraid of the people, were content to make
speeches and present petitions; they appealed to the people to wait patiently;
they endeavoured to make an agreement, to strike a bargain with the
pogrom-mongers’ government. And the tsar, perceiving that he was dealing with
cringing bourgeois and not with men of fighting spirit, sent them packing for
making objectionable speeches.

Workers,peasants and all toilers! Do not forget this great lesson! Remember
that in the autumn of 1905, when the revolutionary workers were at the head of
the struggling people, when the workers’ strike and the workers’ uprising were
reinforced by risings of peasants and politically-conscious soldiers, the
government made concessions. But when, in the spring and summer of 1906, the
people were headed by the liberal-monarchist bourgeoisie, the Cadets, the party
of vacillation between the power of the people and the power of the
pogrom-mongers, then instead of obtaining concessions the deputies were booted
out of the Duma by the police and the Duma was dissolved.

Thedissolution of the Duma has clearly revealed to every one how futile and
fruitless are Cadet petitions, and how necessary it is to support the struggle of the proletariat. By its strike in
October the working class extorted a promise of freedom. Now it is
mobilising its forces in order, by means of an uprising of the whole
people, to wrest real freedom from the hands of the enemy, to overthrow
the tsarist government, to establish a republic, to secure that all state
authorities without exception are elected, and to convene through a
provisional revolutionary government a national constituent assembly
elected on the basis of universal, direct and equal suffrage by secret
ballot.

Theliberty for which the working class is fighting is liberty for the whole
people, not merely for the nobility and the rich. The workers need liberty in
order to launch a wide struggle for the complete emancipation of labour from the
tyranny of capital, for the abolition of all exploitation of man by man, for a
socialist system of society. As long as the rule of capital remains, no
equality, not even equality of tenure for small peasant proprietors on the
common land of the people, will save the people from poverty, unemployment and
oppression. Only the solidarity of all the workers, supported b; the mass of the
working people, can overthrow the yoke of capital, which is weighing so heavily
on the workers of all countries. In socialist society, liberty and equality
will no longer be a sham; the working people will no longer be divided by
working in small, isolated, private enterprises; the wealth accumulated by
common labour will serve the mass of the people and not oppress them; the rule
of the workers will abolish all oppression of one nation, religion or sex by
another.

Comradeworkers, and all citizens of Russia! Make use of the elections to
strengthen the real champions of liberty and socialism, to open the eyes of all
to the real aims and the true character of the various parties!

Besidesthe Social-Democrats, three main groups of parties are taking part in
the elections: the Black Hundreds, the Cadets, and the Trudoviks.

The Black Hundreds are the parties supporting the government. They stand for
an autocratic monarchy, police rule and the perpetuation of landlordism. They
are: the Monarchist Party, the Union of the Russian People, the Party of Law
and Order, the Commercial and Industrial Party, the

Union of October Seventeenth and the Party of Peaceful Renovation. These are all
open enemies of the people, direct champions of the pogrom-mongers’ government,
the government which dissolved the Duma, the government of military courts.

The Cadets (Constitutional-Democrats, or the “party of people’s freedom”)
are the leading party of the liberal-monarchist bourgeoisie. The liberal
bourgeoisie are oscillating between the people and the pogrom-mongers’
government. In words they oppose the government, but in fact what they fear most is
the struggle of the people; they want to come to terms with the monarchy, i.e.,
with the pogrom-mongers, against the people. In the Duma the Cadets pro posed
repressive laws against the press and against public meetings. In the Duma the
Cadets were opposed to referring the land question to local committees elected
on the basis of universal, direct and equal suffrage by secret ballot. The
Cadets are liberal landlords, who are afraid that the peasants might settle the
land question in their own way. Those who do not want the police regime to be
able to disperse the people’s deputies, those who do not want the peasants to
have to bear land redemption payments as ruinous as those of 1861, must see to
it that the Second Duma will not be a Cadet Duma like the First.

The Trudoviks are parties and groups which express the interests and views of
the small proprietors, mainly the small peasants. The most timid of these
parties is the Toilers’ Popular Socialist Party; it is little better than the
Cadets. Then follows the Duma “Trudovik Group”, the best members of
which, such as Onipko, assisted in the popular uprising after the dissolution of
the Duma. The most revolutionary of the Trudovik parties is the
Socialist-Revolutionary Party. The Trudoviks are inclined resolutely—some
times even to the point of an uprising—to uphold the interests of the
peasant masses in their struggle for land and liberty, but in their activities
they are by no means always able to shake off the influence of the liberal
bourgeois and bourgeois views. The small proprietor stands at the parting of the
ways in the great world-wide struggle between labour and capital. He has either
to try to “get on in the world” in bourgeois fashion and become a
master himself, or to try to help the proletariat overthrow the rule of the bourgeoisie. We, the
Social-Democrats, will use the elections to tell the peasant masses and
all friends of the peasantry that the only way by which the peasants will
be able to get land and liberty is not through petitions, but by
fighting, not by relying on the tsar and the promises of the liberal
bourgeoisie, but by relying on the power of a united struggle shoulder to
shoulder with the working class.

The Social-Democratic Party is the party of the class-conscious, militant
proletariat. It has no faith in any promises of the bourgeoisie; it seeks
salvation from poverty and want not through the consolidation of small
production, but through the united struggle of all the working people for
socialism.

Comradeworkers, and all of you who are employees of capital! You have all seen
that when the government deprived you of the beginnings of liberty the
bourgeoisie proceeded to deprive the workers of all their gains, to increase
hours and cut wages again, to increase fines, to tighten the screw generally, to
harass or dismiss class-conscious workers. Only by the triumph of liberty can
the workers and office employees safeguard what they have won from the
bourgeoisie, and secure an eight-hour day, higher wages, and tolerable
conditions of life. And only by a united, concerted, supremely heroic struggle
at the head of the mass of the working people can the working class win real
liberty for the whole people.

Comradeworkers, and all citizens of Russia! Vote for the candidates of the
Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party! It is a party that is fighting for
complete freedom, for a republic, for the election of government officials by
the people. It is fighting against all national oppression. It is fighting for
all the land to be given to the peasantry with out compensation . It is supporting all the demands of the politically conscious
sailors and soldiers by fighting to secure the abolition of the standing army
and the substitution for it of the armed nation.

Comradeworkers, and all citizens of Russia! Vote for the candidates of the
Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party!

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