V. I.

Lenin

Toall appearances the brief “lull” which has marked our
revolutionary movement for the past six to nine months, as distinguished
from its previous rapid and stormy development, is drawing to a
close. However brief this “lull” may have been, however
obvious it has been to every careful and informed observer that the
absence (for so short a time) of open manifestations of mass indignation
among the workers by no means signifies a stop in the growth of this
indignation both in depth and in extent, numerous voices have nevertheless
been raised among our intelligentsia—who are revolutionary in spirit
but frequently have neither firm ties with the working class nor a sound
foundation of definite socialist convictions—expressing despondency
and a lack of faith in the mass working-class movement, on the one hand,
and, on the other, calling for a repetition of the old tactics of
individual, political assassinations as a necessary and obligatory method
of political struggle at the present time. During the few months that have
elapsed since the demonstrations of the previous season, a
“party” of “Socialist-Revolutionaries” has had time to arise in our country, and has begun to declaim loudly that
demonstrations have a discouraging effect, that “the people, alas,
are still a long way off,” and that it is easy, of course , to
speak and write of arming the masses, but that now it is necessary to get
down to “individual resistance” without trying to wriggle out
of the urgent necessity of individual terror by obsolete references to one
and the same old task (so dull and “uninteresting” to the
intellectual who is free from “dogmatic” faith in the working-class movement!) of carrying on agitation among the proletarian
masses and organising a mass onslaught.

Butwhat at first sight seemed a most ordinary and “common
place” strike suddenly broke out in Rostov-on-Don and led to events
which manifestly demonstrated the utter stupidity and harmfulness of the
Socialist-Revolutionaries’ attempt to restore the Narodnaya Volya movement
with all its theoretical and tactical mistakes. The strike, which Involved
many thousands of workers and began with demands of a purely economic
nature, rapidly developed into a political event, despite the extreme
dearth of organised revolutionary forces participating in it. Crowds of
people which, according to some participants, numbered between twenty and
thirty thousand, held astonishingly serious and well-organised political
meetings where Social-Democratic leaf lets were read and eagerly
discussed, political speeches were delivered, the most casual and
untrained representatives of the working people were told the elementary
truths of socialism and the political struggle, and practical and
“object” lessons were given on how to deal with the soldiers
and how to appeal to them. The authorities and the police lost their heads
(perhaps partly because the soldiers could not be relied on?) and for
several days proved unable to interfere with the organising of open-air
political mass gatherings, the like of which had never before been seen in
Russia. When armed force was finally brought in, the crowd offered
desperate resistance, and the murder of a comrade served as the occasion
for a political demonstration at his funeral the following day.... The
Socialist-Revolutionaries, however, most likely see the thing in a
different light; from their standpoint it would perhaps have been
“more expedient” if the six comrades murdered in Rostov had
given their lives in an attempt on the lives of individual police tyrants.

We,however, are of the opinion that it is only such mass movements, in
which mounting political consciousness and revolutionary activity are
openly manifested to all by the working class, that deserve to be called
genuinely revolutionary acts and are capable of really encouraging everyone who is fighting for the Russian revolution. What we
see here is not the much-vaunted “individual resistance,” whose only
connection with the masses consists of verbal declarations, publication of
sentences passed, etc. What we see is genuine resistance on the part of the crowd; and the lack of
organisation, unpreparedness and spontaneity of this resistance remind us
how unwise it is to exaggerate our revolutionary forces and how criminal
it is to neglect the task of steadily improving the organisation and
preparedness of this crowd, which is waging an actual struggle before our
very eyes. The only task worthy of a revolutionary is to learn to
elaborate, utilise and make our own the material which Russian life
furnishes in only too great sufficiency, rather than fire a few shots in
order to create pretexts for stimulating the masses, and material for
agitation and for political reflection. The Socialist-Revolutionaries
cannot find enough praise of the great “agitational” effect of
political assassinations, about which there is so much whispering both in
the drawing-rooms of the liberals and in the taverns of the common
people. It is nothing to them (since they are free of all narrow dogmas on
anything even approximating a definite socialist theory!) to stage a
political sensation as a substitute (or, at least, as a
supplement) for the political education of the proletariat. We, however,
consider that the only events that can have a real and serious
“agitational” (stimulating), and not only stimulating but also
(and this is far more important) educational, effect are events in which
the masses themselves are the actors, events which are born of the
sentiments of the masses and not staged “for a special purpose” by one organisation or another. We believe that even a
hundred regicides can never produce so stimulating and educational an
effect as this participation of tens of thousands of working people in
meetings where their vital interests and the links between politics and
these interests are discussed, and as this participation in a struggle,
which really rouses ever new and “untapped” sections of the proletariat to greater political consciousness, to a broader
revolutionary struggle. We are told of the disorganisation of the
government (which has been obliged to replace Messrs. the Sipyagins by
Messrs. the Plehves and to “select” the vilest scoundrels to
serve it), but we are convinced that to sacrifice one revolutionary, even in exchange for ten scoundrels, means only
disorganising our own ranks, which are thin as it is, so thin that they
cannot keep up with all that is “demanded” of them by the workers. We believe that the government is truly disorganised when,
and only when, the broad masses, genuinely organised by the struggle
itself, plunge the government into a state of confusion; when the
legitimacy of the demands of the progressive elements of the working class
becomes apparent to the crowd in the street and begins to be clear even to
part of the troops called out for the purpose of “pacification”; when military action against tens of thousands
of the people is preceded by wavering among the authorities, who have no
way of really knowing what this military action will lead to; when the
crowd see and feel that those who have fallen on the field of civil war
are their comrades, a part of themselves, and are filled with new wrath
and a desire to grapple more decisively with the enemy. Here it is no
longer some scoundrel, but the existing system as a whole that comes out
as the enemy of the people, against whom are arrayed the local and the
St. Petersburg authorities, the police, the Cossacks, and the troops, to
say nothing of the gendarmes and the courts which, as ever, supplement and
complete the picture in every popular uprising.

Yes,uprising. However far the beginning of what seemed to be a strike
movement in a remote provincial town was from a “genuine”
uprising, its continuation and its finale nevertheless evoke involuntary
thoughts of an uprising. The prosaic motive for the strike and the minor
nature of the demands presented by the workers throw into particularly
bold relief, not only the mighty power of the solidarity of the
proletariat, which at once saw that the railway workers’ struggle was the
common cause of the proletarians, but also its receptiveness of political
ideas and political propaganda, and its readiness to defend with might and
main, in open battle with the troops, those rights to a free life and free
development which all thinking workers have already come to consider
common and elementary. And the Don Committee was a thousand times right
when it declared in its proclamation, “To All Citizens,” which we
print in full elsewhere in this issue, that the Rostov strike was one of
the steps towards a general upsurge among the Russian workers with the
demand for political liberty. [1]
In events of this sort we really see with our own eyes how an armed
uprising of the whole people against the autocratic government is maturing, not only as an idea in the minds and programmes of the
revolutionaries, but also as the inevitable, natural and practical
next step of the movement itself, as the result of the growing
indignation, growing experience, and growing boldness of the masses, who
are being given such valuable lessons, such a splendid education by the
realities of Russian life.

Aninevitable and natural step, I have said—and I hasten to make the
reservation: if only we do not permit ourselves to depart by a
single step from the impending and pressing task of assisting these
masses, who have already begun to rise, to act more boldly and
concertedly; of giving them not a couple but dozens of open-air speakers
and leaders; of creating a real, militant organisation capable of guiding
the masses, and not a so-called “combat organisation” that
guides elusive individuals (if it does guide them at all). That this is a
difficult task goes without saying, but we can quite justifiably adapt
Marx’s words which have so frequently and so ineptly been quoted of late,
and say: “Every step of real movement is more important
than a dozen” individual attempts and cases of resistance, more
important than a hundred organisations and “parties” belonging
only to the intelligentsia. [2]

Besidesthe Rostov fighting, the penal sentences passed on demonstrators
are outstanding among recent political events. The government has decided
to use every possible method of intimidation, from floggings to penal
servitude. And what a splendid reply it received from the workers, whose
speeches in court we give below [3] ; how instructive this reply is to all those who were especially loud in
their outcries about the discouraging effect of demonstrations, not
because they wanted to encourage further work in this direction, but
because they wanted to preach much-vaunted individual resistance! These
speeches, coming as they do from the very thick of the proletariat, are
excellent commentaries on events like those in Rostov, and, at the same
time, they are remarkable statements (“public manifestations,” I
would say if this were not so specifically police terminology), imbuing
with boundless vigour the long and difficult work for the
“real” steps of the movement. What is remarkable in these
speeches is the simple, authentically precise description of how the most everyday facts, occurring in
scores and hundreds 01 millions , of the “misery, oppression, slavery, degradation,
exploitation” of the workers in present-day society lead to the
awakening of their consciousness, to their growing “revolt,” to a
revolutionary expression of this revolt (I have put in quotation marks the
words I had to use in describing the speeches of the
Nizhni-Novgorod workers, for they are the famous words which Marx uses in
the last pages of the first volume of Capital , and which evoked
such clamorous and unsuccessful attempts on the part of the
“critics,” opportunists, revisionists, etc., to refute the
Social-Democrats and accuse them of not telling the truth).

Forthe very reason that these speeches came from ordinary workers by no
means advanced in their development, workers who did not even speak as
members of any particular organisation, but simply as men in the crowd,
for the very reason that they stressed not their personal convictions but
facts from the life of every proletarian or semi-proletarian in Russia,
for that very reason their conclusions are so inspiring: “that is
why we consciously went to the demonstration against the autocratic
government.” The ordinariness and “mass character” of the
facts from which they drew their conclusions are a guarantee that
thousands, tens and hundreds of thousands, can and inevitably will come to
the same conclusion, provided we prove capable of continuing, extending,
and strengthening systematic, theoretically consistent, and all-round
revolutionary (Social Democratic) influence over them. We are ready to be
condemned to penal servitude for fighting against political and economic
slavery now that we have felt the breath of liberty, said four workers
from Nizhni-Novgorod. And thousands of workers in Rostov, who for several
days won for themselves the right to hold political gatherings, fighting
off a series of attacks on the part of the soldiers against the unarmed
crowd, repeated after them as It were: we are ready to face death.

Bythis sign shall ye conquer, is all that remains for us to say to those who
have eyes to see and ears to hear.

---
Notes:
[1]
The proclamation of the Don Committee of the R.S.D.L.P., “To All
Citizens,” dated November 6, 1902, was reprinted by Iskra ,
No. 29, December 1, 1902.

[2]
Lenin is referring to the following passage from Karl Marx’s letter to
Wilhelm Bracke, of May 5, 1875: “Every step of real movement is more
important than a dozen programmes” (see Marx and Engels,
Selected Works , Vol. II, Moscow, 1958, p. 16).

[3]
Lenin is referring to the speeches made in court on October 28-31
(November 10-13), 1902, by Nizhni-Novgorod workers on trial for taking
part in demonstrations on May I and 5 (14 and 18), 1902. The speeches were
originally published as a separate leaflet by the Nizhni-Novgorod
Committee of the R.S.D.L.P.; they were later reprinted by Iskra
(No. 29, December 1, 1902) under the heading “Nizhni-Novgorod
Workers in Court” and issued as a separate pamphlet.