V. I.

Lenin

According to newspaper reports, the question of the date
when the Fourth Duma should be convened and of the time when elections to
it should be held has aroused some doubts among the ruling circles. Some
were in favour of postponing the convening of the Duma until January, while
others declared for October. Now the question is said to have been decided
in favour of the latter opinion.

Thus the elections are quite near at hand—a mere seven to nine
weeks. We must take steps to redouble our efforts with regard to
all aspects of our pre-election work.

I should like to deal in this article with a special question, which,
however, has acquired very great general importance for the worker
democrats. I mean the role of the St. Petersburg elections.

The elections in St. Petersburg’s second urban curia are the focal
point of the entire Fourth Duma election campaign.

Only in St. Petersburg is there a tolerably well organised
working-class press, one which, for all the fierce persecution it is
subjected to, for all the fines and the arrests of its editors, for all the
instability of its position, and for all that it is kept down by the
censorship, is able to reflect, to some little degree, the views of worker
democrats.

In the absence of a daily press, the elections remain an obscure
matter, and their significance in terms of the political enlightenment of
the masses is reduced by half, if not more.

For this reason, the St. Petersburg elections acquire the significance
of a model of the election campaign which worker democrats have to
undertake in the incredibly difficult conditions of Russian reality. Nowhere else are the workers in a position
to hold an election campaign visible to every one. To be sure, the
elections in the worker curia are highly important, but there the workers
cannot come up against the other classes of the population, and therefore
cannot present on an adequate scale the national demands,
and the views on the tasks involved in a common policy , which have
deen worked out by the progressive, proletarian democrats, so that they may serve all democrats in general as a
guide.

In St. Petersburg the elections are direct. Hence the pre-election
struggle here may take much more definite, more distinct and more partisan
forms than elsewhere. The other big cities would have been as important as
St. Petersburg. but administrative pressure in the provinces is
still so much stronger than in the capital that it is difficult
for worker democrats to force their way through, to get a hearing.

Lastly, in St. Petersburg the struggle in the second curia has to take
place between the liberals and the democrats. The Cadets consider the
second curia to be their domain. St. Petersburg is represented by
Milyukov, Rodichev and Kutler.

Obviously, the fact that a fairly large number of democratic voters are
represented by the liberals can by no means be considered normal. The
elections to the Second Duma showed that Cadet “domination” among the
democratic urban voters is very far from being solid. In St. Petersburg
itself, the “Left bloc” in the Second Duma elections, i.e., the bloc of
worker and bourgeois democrats (Narodniks), not only could , but
certainly would , have won, if at that time Mensheviks like Dan and
Co. had not split the workers’ election campaign and thereby given rise,
among the Narodniks, to wavering and vacillations that were exceedingly
harmful to the success of the cause. One has only to recall that in the
Second Duma elections even the “Socialist Revolutionaries” followed the
Mensheviks’ lead to the last minute, defending their bloc with the Cadets!

The electoral law now in force permits of a second ballot, so that no
blocs are required, or permissible, at the first stage.

The struggle in St. Petersburg will be between the worker democrats and
the liberals. The Narodniks will hardly be strong enough to act
independently—they have been “liquidating” themselves much too
zealously by following our liquidators’ line. The worker democrats are
therefore almost certain to be supported by the bourgeois democrats
(Trudoviks and Narodniks), if not at the first stage of the election, then
at any rate when a second ballot is taken.

The liberals have their leader, Mr. Milyukov, from St. Petersburg. They
have had a large following so far. The funds which the liberal-monarchist
bourgeoisie supplies them with, the propaganda weapons in the form of two
daily newspapers, and an organisation which is virtually tolerated and all
but legalised de facto , all afford the Cadets tremendous
advantages.

On the workers’ side are the mass of the workers, consistent and
sincere democracy, energy and devotion to the cause of socialism and
working-class democracy. The workers can win if they rely on
these forces and if they have a workers’ daily newspaper. The
workers’ struggle for seats in the Duma for St. Petersburg is undoubtedly
acquiring a vast and country-wide significance in the entire
Fourth Duma election campaign.

Those who like to talk of “unity” of the whole opposition—from the
Progressists and Cadets to the warily dodging liquidator Martov and the
crudely simple-minded Prokopovich and Akimov—are all at pains to evade
the issue of the St. Petersburg elections or to leave it out. They bypass
the political centre but readily make their way into what may be called the
political backwoods. They speak volubly, fervently and eloquently of what
will be opportune at the second stage of the elections, i.e., when the
principal, the chief, the decisive, part of the election campaign is over,
and they “are eloquently silent” about St. Petersburg, which has been won
by the Cadets and which has to be won back from them, has to be
restored to the democrats.

There were no democratic deputies for St. Petersburg under the law of
December 11,1905, nor under that of June 3, 1907, [2] so that “restored” would seem to be an unsuitable term. But
St. Petersburg belongs to the democrats by virtue of the entire course of
the entire emancipation movement in

Russia, and at a certain stage of its development even the
monstrously high dam of the June Third electoral law will be unable to stem
the “democratic flood”.

The majority of the voters in the second curia undoubtedly come from
the democratic sections of the population. The Cadets induce them to follow
their lead by simply deceiving them, by making themselves, a
liberal-monarchist bourgeois party, out to be democrats. This kind of
deceit has been, and is, practised by all liberals in the world in
elections to every sort of parliament. And the workers’ parties in all
countries gauge their success by, among other things, the extent to which
they succeed in freeing petty-bourgeois democrats from liberal influence.

The Russian Marxists, too, must set themselves this task clearly,
specifically, and firmly. That is why, with regard to the big cities, they
have said plainly in their well-known January decisions that blocs there
are permissible, in view of the known absence of a Black-Hundred danger,
only with the democrats, against the liberals. [1]

This decision “takes the bull by the horns”. It gives a straightforward
answer to one of the most important questions of election tactics. It
determines the spirit , the trend, and the character of the
entire election campaign.

On the other hand, those liquidators who like to talk of the Cadets as
of “representatives of the “urban democracy are committing a grave
error. This kind of talk distorts matters by representing the
liberals ’ election victories over the democrats, and the
liberals’ election tricks played on democratic voters, as proof of
the Cadets’ “democracy”. As though Europe did not know of dozens of
instances of anti-democratic parties for years keeping various democratic
strata in leading strings, until real bourgeois democrats, but most often
Social-Democrats, freed those strata from the influence of political
parties that were alien to them in spirit.

The election struggle in St. Petersburg is a struggle for hegemony
between the liberals and the worker democrats within the whole of Russia’s
emancipation movement.

This exceptionally important role of the St. Petersburg elections leads
us, incidentally, to two practical conclusions.

He to whom much is given, much shall be asked. The St. Petersburg workers
will have to carry on the election campaign in the urban second curia on
behalf of all the worker democrats of all Russia. It is a great
and difficult task that they have to tackle. They must serve as a
model. They must show the greatest initiative, energy and
perseverance. They have done so in regard to the workers’ daily
newspaper. At the elections, too, they must continue the work they have
begun so splendidly.

The attention of all Russia is riveted on the election struggle in
St. Petersburg. All Russia should also help St. Petersburg. Unless
the St. Petersburg workers receive the most varied aid from all parts of
Russia, they will be unable to overcome the “enemy” by themselves.