V. I.

Lenin

The opening of the Duma sessions has coincided with the outbreak of
Black-Hundred riots. The first steps on the path of “peaceful
parliamentarism”, a path which caused the Cadets and all philistines in
politics to go into raptures and tears of joy, have coincided with the most
brutal, most direct and immediate manifestations of civil war. The introduction
of the “constitutional” method of deciding affairs of state, the
method of ballot-papers and the counting of votes, has coincided with outbreaks
of the most primitive violence, with the settlement of affairs of state by
exterminating dissidents, by annihilating political opponents (literally
annihilating by fire and sword). [1]

Is this a chance coincidence? Of course not. And it would be inadequate as an
explanation to say that the police is organising riots for provocative purposes,
for the purpose of discrediting the Duma. Of course, there cannot be the shadow
of a doubt that the police is directly involved. Of course, the police is
organising, inciting and provoking. All this is true. In a war which the
bureaucracy is waging, virtually for its very existence, its servants and
supporters literally stick at nothing. But why do they have to resort to such
methods of struggle, and on such a large scale, precisely at the present time?
This question is worth considering, in order to avoid ascribing whole periods of
revolutionary development to the exceptional viciousness, exceptional blood
thirstiness and exceptional bestiality of the combatants.

We are witnessing the beginning of a social revival. The unemployed movement,
the May Day demonstrations, the growing unrest among the peasantry and in the
armed forces, the meetings, the press, the unions, are all unambiguous
indications of this revival. In a matter of days the revival of the broad
popular movement has already outstripped the revival that was expressed in the
victory of the Cadets and of the “Left” in general at the
elections. The Cadets have already fallen behind. The Cadet Duma is already
fading—it is withering before it has had time to blossom. This withering
of our barren petty-bourgeois flowers, this consternation of the Cadets, is most
characteristically expressed, among other things, in an article by
Mr. D. Protopopov (a Cadet member of the State Duma) in yesterday’s issue of
Duma . Mr. Protopopov says, complaining and wailing: “The country
expects from the State Duma the radical and immediate solution of a number of
extremely intricate problems and, above all, the equally immediate practical
introduction of the expected reforms.” But have a heart, my dear
fellow-citizens— wails this Cadet. We have neither a “magician’s
wand”, nor complete power” (the Cadet forgets to add that neither
does the programme, i.e., the political ideal, of the Cadets, include complete
power for the people). The State Duma is not the Convention. And from the lips
of this Cadet comes the matchless, almost touching admission of a terrified
philistine: “Only such a Duma-Convention could satisfy the demands of
the bulk of the nation.” What is true is true. “The bulk”, perhaps
the whole mass of the workers and peasants, are demanding a Convention, and all
they get is—a Cadet Duma. Poor, poor Cadets! Could they have anticipated
that they would be so quickly and so hopelessly overtaken by the rising tide?

And now this great tide is the material basis of the fact that the struggle is
becoming extraordinarily acute, that peaceful parliamentarism” is fading
and slipping into the background, and that playing at a constitution is giving
way to the settlement of affairs of state by force. The result is the resumption
of the October uprising, but on a much wider basis, on a much greater scale,
with the masses of the peasantry and the working class more politically
conscious and (thanks to what they passed through in the period of

October-December) with incomparably more political experience. In October the
combatant forces were equally balanced. The old autocracy proved to be
no longer strong enough to govern the country. The people were
not yet strong enough to secure complete power that would ensure
complete freedom. The Manifesto of October 17 was the juridical
expression of this equilibrium of forces. But this equilibrium, which compelled
the old regime to make a concession, forced it in to recognising freedom on
paper, merely signified a temporary halt, but not the cessation of the
struggle. In October and November it was said that our government had
“gone on strike”, that it had been “standing rigid” like a setter over the revolution, that it had paused as it waited for the
opportune moment, and had plunged into a desperate battle which ended in its
victory. Political philistines, narrow-mind ed as usual, with the timidity
and flabby, Pharisaical “idealism” that is characteristic of them,
expostulated, wept, and voiced their indignation at the
“immorality” of the government’s “strike”, of its standing rigid like a setter over the revolution. Their indignation was
totally out of place. “In war as in war.” In every war, when the
belligerents’ forces are equally balanced, they pause, gather strength,
recuperate, assimilate the experience they have obtained, make
preparations, and then plunge into the next battle. This is what happened in the
case of the armies of Kuropatkin and Oyama. So it has been, and always will
be, in any great civil war. “In war as in war.”

But civil war differs from ordinary war by its immeasurably greater complexity,
by the fact that the belligerents are unknown and unknowable—because of
desertions from one camp to another (Octobrists go over to the side of the
government, a section of the armed forces go over to the side of the people),
and because it is impossible to draw a hard and fast line between
“combatants” and “non-combatants”. When the government “goes on strike”, when the police pauses waiting and “stands
rigid”, the war goes on just the same, precisely because it is a civil
war, because among the population itself there are those who are interested in
defending the old regime and those who are fighting for freedom. That is why the
present upswing, which has equalised the belligerent forces, is also with
inexorable necessity weakening the government, compelling it to “go on strike”, to “stand rigid over the
revolution” again to a certain extent, and on the other hand, is leading
to a resumption of the October, November and December forms of
struggle. Whoever wants to take a conscious stand on the great events unfolding
before us, whoever wants to learn from the revolution, must realise that these
forms of struggle are inevitable, and must think out the tasks that these forms
of struggle impose upon us.

The Cadets, intoxicated with their election victories, have written reams of
paper about Russia having taken the path of parliamentarism. The
Social-Democrats in the Right wing of our Party have allowed themselves to be
carried away by the general stream. At the Unity Congress of the Party,
although they were the victors, and in spite of the protests of the Left
Social-Democrats, they withdrew their resolution on the upswing of the
revolution, on the main forms of the movement at the present time, and on the
tasks of the proletariat. They behaved in this respect like Mr. Milyukov who,
at the last congress of the Constitutional-Democratic Party, touched on the
question whether the people were not more revolutionary than the Duma, whether a
revolutionary struggle in the narrow sense of the word was not inevitable, but
at once timidly withdrew the question from discussion. It was natural for a
Cadet to evade such an issue; but it is unseemly for Social-Democrats to do so,
and they are already paying the penalty for this. Forms of struggle are already
arising, with elemental force, that are pushing the Duma into the background
and are bringing nearer another October and another December, whether we like it
or not.

At the Party Congress, a Right Social-Democrat scoffed at the resolution of the
Left Social-Democrats which openly and straightforwardly recognised as the
“main form of the movement”, not the toy-constitutional,
but the October-December form, i.e., the action of the broad masses, who
directly sweep away the old laws and the old instruments of authority, and make
use of a new authority, created in the very course of the struggle, as a weapon
for winning freedom. There is no evidence of these forms of struggle, exclaimed
this Right Social-Democratic speaker. They do not exist, they are the figment of
the imagination of our Lefts, those visionaries, those rebels, those
anarchists. “Take off your

Cadet spectacles!”—we retorted to this comrade at the Congress. You will
then see something more than what is taking place on the surface. You will
see that it is not the Duma struggle that is the main struggle,
you will realise that objective conditions are making the
extra-Duma forms of the move ment inevitable, are making them the
main, vital, fundamental and decisive forms.

A week or two has passed since these debates took place at the Congress. And
already the revolution is knocking the Cadet spectacles off the noses not only
of the Right Social-Democrats, but also of the broad masses of the people. The
Duma is already fading, constitutional illusions are being dispelled. The
October-December forms of struggle, which only yesterday short-sighted people,
and those who yield to the moods of the moment, refused to see, are already
approaching. And the Social-Democrats will be failing in their duty to the
proletariat if they do not realise that these forms of struggle must inevitably
grow and develop, if they do not fully explain to the masses the tasks which the
situation is calling forth, and which will soon confront them. The
Social-Democrats will prove unworthy of the class they represent if they attempt to
evade the study and appraisal of these forms by uttering disparaging catchwords
like “rebelliousness” and “Narodnaya Volya-ism” that are so often heard from the Right wing of our Party. The tide is rising
spontaneously, and we must do all in our power to bring more consciousness and
organisation into this upsurge than we were able to do in October and December.

We must not force the pace of events. It is not in our interest to hasten an
explosion at present. There can be no doubt about that. This is the lesson we
must learn from the experience of the end of 1905. But this is only a small part
of our task:

it is a purely negative definition of our tactics. Whoever con fines himself to
this aspect of the matter, whoever exalts this negative task to something
positive, is bound to slide into the role of a bourgeois advocate of compromise
between people’s freedom and the autocracy.

The party of the working class has an extremely serious, urgent and fundamental
task to fulfil. We must concentrate all our plans, all our efforts, all our
propaganda, agitation, organisation and immediate practical work on ensuring
that

the proletariat and the peasantry are better prepared for the new, decisive
struggle. We cannot will the choice of the forms of this struggle: they are
being determined with iron necessity by the historical development of the
Russian revolution. We already know from experience what the government’s
“standing rigid” means, and what the growing agitation among the
masses over the rapidly maturing general political crisis means. We know with
what dizzying rapidity the October struggle grew, and how inevitably it
developed into the December struggle. Therefore let everybody be at his
post. Nobody can forecast the moment when things will. reach their climax;
nobody knows in what order and in what combination the December and October
forms of the move ment will finally develop. But they are already beginning to
develop. The organs of this movement are already springing up. On the
solidarity, class-consciousness, self-control and resolution of the advanced
class depends in large measure, if not entirely, the outcome of the great
revolution.

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Notes:
[1]
The burning down of the People’s House at Vologda by a mob instigated
by the police, and the beating up of demonstrators at Simbirsk are the
outstanding cases of riots during the past few days.— Lenin