V. I.

Lenin

Revolutionary Days

1

What Is Happening in Russia?

Revoltor revolution? This is the question that European journalists and
reporters have been asking themselves in connection with the events in
St. Petersburg, which they are reporting to the whole world and attempting to
evaluate. Are they rebels or insurgents—the tens of thousands of
proletarians against whom the tsarist army successfully took the field? And the
foreign papers, though sooner in a position to view the events with
“detachment”, with the impartiality of chroniclers, find it
difficult to answer the question. They are constantly getting their terms
mixed. And small wonder. It is not without reason that a revolution is said to
be a successful revolt, and a revolt an unsuccessful revolution. People who
witness the beginning of great and momentous events, who can obtain only very
incomplete, inexact, and third-hand information of what is taking place, will
not, of course, hazard a definite opinion until a timelier moment comes. The
bourgeois papers, which continue as of old to speak of revolt, rioting, and
disturbances, cannot help seeing the truly national, nay, international,
significance of these events. Yet it is this significance which invests events
with the character of revolution. And those who have been writing of the last
days of the rioting find themselves involuntarily referring to them as the first
days of the revolution. A turning-point in Russia’s history has been
reached. This is not denied even by the most hidebound of European
conservatives, however enthusiastic and. sentimental they may wax over the
mighty, unrestricted power of the all-Russian autocracy. Peace between the
autocracy and the people is unthinkable. Revolution is not only in the mouths of
a few fearless souls, not only of “nihilists”—as Europe persists in
calling the Russian revolutionaries—but of every person capable of taking
any interest in world politics.

The Russian working-class movement has risen to a higher level in the last few
days. It is developing before our very eyes into a national
uprising. Naturally, here in Geneva, so damnably far away, we find it
exceedingly difficult to keep pace with events. But so long as we have to
linger at such an accursed distance, we must try to keep pace with events,
to sum them up, to draw conclusions, to draw from the experience of
today’s happenings lessons that will be useful tomorrow, in another place,
where today “the people are still mute” and where in the near
future, in some form or other, a revolutionary conflagration will break
out. We must make it the constant job of publicists to write the history
of the present day, and to try to write it in such a way that our
chronicles will give the greatest possible help to the direct participants
in the movement and to the heroic proletarians there, on the scene of
action—to write it in such a way as to promote the spread of the
movement, the conscious selection of the means, ways, and methods of
struggle that, with the least expenditure of effort, will yield the most
substantial and permanent results.

Inthe history of revolutions there come to light contradictions that have
ripened for decades and centuries. Life becomes unusually eventful. The masses,
which have always stood in the shade and have therefore often been ignored and
even despised by superficial observers, enter the political arena as active
combatants. These masses are learning in practice, and before the eyes. of the
world are taking their first tentative steps, feeling their way, defining their
objectives, testing themselves and the theories of all their ideologists. These
masses are making heroic efforts to rise to the occasion and cope with the
gigantic tasks of world significance imposed upon them by history; and however
great individual defeats may be, however shattering to us the rivers of blood
and the thousands of victims, nothing will ever compare in importance with this
direct training that the masses and the classes receive in the course of the
revolutionary struggle itself. The history of this struggle is measured in
days. And for good reason some foreign news papers have already started a
“diary of the Russian revolution”. Let us, too, start one.

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