V. I.

Lenin

Resolution of the St. Petersburg Organisation of the R.S.D.L.P. on the Tactics of Boycott [1]

Whereas:

(1) the State Duma to be convened under the Law of August 6-December 11 is the
grossest travesty of a popular representative assembly, since the vast
majority of the proletariat and the peasantry has virtually been debarred
from participation in the Duma owing to the fact that the suffrage is not
universal and the electors from the workers and peas ants are sifted through
three or four sieves; (2) by artificially controlling the composition of the body of electors and by
establishing a number of privileges in favour of the rich landlords and big
capitalists, the government seeks to ensure complete preponderance in the
Duma of representatives, not merely of the exploiting classes, but of the
Black-Hundred elements of those classes; (3) the government most brazenly rigs even these elections—which are
restricted within the narrow limits of the social-estates—by ruling
out all freedom of agitation, establishing martial law and unbounded police
tyranny everywhere, and persecuting, in defiance of all legislation and
without trial, not only members of the revolutionary and socialist parties,
but even members of the parties of the monarchist-liberal bourgeoisie
(Constitutionalist-Democrats, etc.); (4) the government is now repealing its own law on simultaneous elections in
order artificially to appoint, in the various localities, the dates that
suit it best, and to force the elections through at such speed that it will
be impossible for those elected to establish any contact with the population; (5) the autocratic government expects by convening the Duma to influence
Russian, and especially foreign, public opinion and thereby to put off its
inevitable downfall and obtain further millions of. rubles in loans to crush
the revolution and continue oppressing the people; (6) the Law of February 20, [2] which transforms the Council of State into an
Upper Chamber, makes still worse the statute governing the Duma, by seeking
to reduce the latter completely to the role of an impotent advisory
appendage of the autocratic bureaucracy; (7) under these political conditions, participation in such a Duma is considered
impossible by the overwhelming majority of the Social-Democratic parties and
organisations of all nations in the country; (8) participation of the Social-Democrats in the State Duma elections at any
stage is likely to encourage among the people the incorrect idea that there
is a possibility of reason ably fair elections for the parties that uphold
the interests of the broad masses; (9) participation in the elections is likely to divert the attention of the
proletariat from the revolutionary movements of the workers, peasants,
soldiers, etc., that are taking place apart from the Duma to the tiny matter
of a pseudo-legal, sham constitutional election campaign and to lower still
more the temporarily depressed mood of the working class by creating the
impression that the revolutionary period of the struggle is over, the
question of an uprising, has been shelved, and the Party is taking the
constitutional path; (10) elections to the State Duma imply a situation in which the Party must keep
within legal and peaceful bounds; for this reason our participation in the
elections would have a harmful effect on the pressing revolutionary
task—that of more vigorous actions against the government during the
Duma elections and at the time of its convocation; (11) the Party of the Social-Democrats cannot go to the polls with the less
developed masses if it wants to educate them from the practical point of view,
for these insufficiently developed masses want to go as far as the Duma and,
moreover, want to do so in the legal way, while the Party would, by refusing to
submit to the laws, merely incur natural distrust on the part of those masses
and prevent them from learning the lessons of the Duma campaign sincerely and
consistently; (12) the workers’ delegates and electors cannot contribute anything towards a
truly revolutionary organisation of the broad sections of the working class
because of the artificial composition of the voters, who have been picked
by police methods, because of the short term and limited nature of their
powers, and because of the circumstances of the elections mentioned above; (13) the Duma cannot be frustrated through the withdrawal from the gubernia
election meetings of that part of the electors whom at best the
Social-Democrats could draw away with them; (14) class-conscious spokesmen for the proletariat of the most oppressed
nationalities of Russia (the Polish, Jewish, Lettish, and Lithuanian
Social-Democrats) flatly reject all participation in the election farce and
are fighting with might and main against those who have enacted it; (15) public opinion of all the militant elements of bourgeois democracy and of
the peasantry (Peasant Union, Teachers’ Union, [3]

Union of Unions, Socialist-Revolutionary Party, Polish Socialist
Party, [4]

Polish Progressive Party, etc.) rejects both the Duma and the
elections to it;— Therefore, this meeting of representatives of
St. Petersburg workers, members of the R.S.D.L.P., deems it necessary:

(1) to reject absolutely all participation in the State Duma; (2) to reject absolutely any elections to the State Duma at any stage whatever; (3) to develop agitational work among the people on as large a scale as possible
in order to expose the true nature of the Duma, put an end to the deception
of public opinion in Russia and Europe, and show the inevitable
disappointment of that section of the peasantry which expects
benefits from the Duma; (4) to utilise in every way, legal and illegal, all meetings connected with the
elections for stating the Social-

Democrats’ views in general and criticising the Duma in particular, and above
all for issuing a call to fight for the revolutionary convocation of a
constituent assembly of the whole people; (5) in counterposing revolutionary methods of struggle for freedom to the
struggle through the Duma, to devote especial attention during this
agitation to familiarising the workers and the people as a whole with the
experience of the December uprising, which marks the beginning of a higher
stage of the revolutionary struggle for genuine freedom for the people; (6) to lay stress, during this agitation in respect of the Duma, on the deep
economic and financial crisis, the extreme intensification of exploitation
of the workers by the reactionary capitalists, the aggravation of
unemployment in the towns and of hunger in the countryside, the peasant
movement that is bound to begin in the spring, and the instances of unrest among
the troops, as circumstances which make a new popular outbreak highly
probable before long, an outbreak that will sweep away the State Duma either
before its convocation or after it, when the population is thoroughly
disillusioned with it; (7) to use this agitation, among other things, for branding those cowardly
representatives of the liberal-monarchist bourgeoisie (such as the Cadets)
who pervert the civic consciousness of the population by fostering
constitutional illusions at a time of bitter civil war, by recommending the
Duma and participation in it, by rejecting the use of force in defence of
freedom and of the rights of the vast majority of the people at a time when
the armed gangs that call them selves the government are holding their
ground only by dint of savage tyranny.

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Notes:
[1]
Lenin submitted the Draft Resolution on the Tactics of Boycott to the St. Petersburg Conference at its February 11(24), 1900,
session. The original wording of the draft has been lost. The draft was
discussed at the Second St. Petersburg Conference at the end of February and
beginning of March 1906, and was edited by a specially appointed committee which
included Lenin.

[2]
The Law of February 20, 1906 , and two decrees to the Senate concerning the Duma and the Council of State reduced to nought all
the promises made in the tsar’s Manifesto of October 17, 1905. That law
transformed the Council of State from a consultative into a legislative
body. The Council of State, half of whose members were appointed while the other
half were elected from among the Black-Hundred sections of the nobility, big
capitalists and the clergy, was thus legally empowered to approve or reject any
decision of the Duma.

[3]
The All-Russian Union of Teachers and Public Education Personnel arose in the spring of 1905. The Second Delegates’ Congress of
the Union, which met on December 26-29, 1905 (January 8-11, 1906), passed a
resolution on the attitude to the First Duma. The resolution described the Duma
as a further government attempt to deceive the people. The Congress declared against participation in the Duma
elections, and stressed the need to reveal th.e true meaning and significance of
the Duma to the population and to make every effort to organise the people for
the struggle to bring about the convocation of a constituent assembly.

[4]
Polish Socialist Party , or P.P.S. (Polska Partia
Socjalistyczna)— a reformist nationalist party founded in 1892. Led by
Pilsudski and his adherents, it carried on separatist, nationalist propaganda
among the Polish workers, and strove to distract them from the struggle in
common with the Russian workers against the autocracy and capitalism.

Throughout the history of the P.P.S. Left-wing groups arose within the Party
under the influence of ordinary workers. Some of them subsequently joined the
revolutionary wing of the Polish working-class movement.

In 1906 the P.P.S. split into a Lewica (Left-wing) P.P.S, and a
Right-wing, chauvinist P.P.S., known as the “revolutionary
faction”.

Under the influence of the Bolshevik Party, and also of the
S.D.K.P.L. (Social-Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania), the
Lewica P.P.S. gradually adopted consistently revolutionary views.

During the First World War a large section of the Lewica P.P.S. took up
an internationalist position, and in December 1918 it merged with the
S.D.K.P.L. The two merged parties formed the Communist Workers’ Party of Poland
(the name borne by the Communist Party of Poland till 1925).

Throughout the First World War the Right-wing P.P.S. continued its
national-chauvinist policy. In Galicia it formed Polish legions which fought on
the side of the Austro-German imperialists.

With the rise of the Polish bourgeois state the Right-wing P.P.S. merged in 1919
with those sections of the P.P.S. that found themselves on the Polish territory
seized at one time by Germany and Austria, and reassumed the name of
P.P.S. Placing itself at the head of the government, it helped in transferring
state power to the Polish bourgeoisie and then steadily carried on
anti-Communist propaganda and backed the policy of aggression against
the Soviet Republic, and the policy of annexation and oppression of
Western Ukraine and Western Byolorussia. Various groups within the
Party, which disagreed with that policy, joined the Communist Party of
Poland.

After Pilsudski’s fascist coup d’état in May 1926 the P.P.S. was in parliamentary
opposition in form, but in fact conducted no active struggle against the fascist
regime, and continued its anti-Communist and anti-Soviet propaganda. In those
years the Left within the PP.5. co-operated with the Polish Communists and in a
number of campaigns supported the tactics of united front.

During the Second World War the P.P.S. split again, Its reactionary, chauvinist
part, which assumed the name of

Wolność,Równośċ, Niepodteglość (Freedom, Equality, Independence), entered the reactionary Polish
“government” in exile (London). The other part, the Left-wing section of the P.P.S., which named itself the Workers’ Party of
Polish Socialists (W.P.P.S.), joined the people’s struggle against the
Hitlerite invaders—under the influence of the Polish Workers’ Party
(P.W.P.), founded in 1942. It fought for the liberation of Poland from
fascist enslavement and took a stand for the establishment of friendly
relations with the U.S.S.R.

In 1944, following the liberation of eastern Poland from German occupation and
the formation of the Polish Committee of National Liberation, the
W.P.P.S. reassumed the name of P.P.S. and together with the P.W.P. took part
in building up a people’s democratic Poland. In December 1948, the P.W.P. and
the P.P.S. merged into the Polish United Workers’ Party
(P.U.W.P.).