V. I.

Lenin

Deputy Shingaryov, one of the most prominent
Cadets, [1] recently delivered a lecture in St. Petersburg on “The New
Duma and Old Problems”, a lively, interesting and topical subject.

As is the custom, our Cadet trounced the
Octobrists. [2] “The Octobrists”, he exclaimed, “hesitate to associate
themselves with the Right wing and dare not associate with the Left”
( Rech [3] No. 70). Our bold (bold, that is, before a democratic
audience) Cadet apparently regards the Progressists as belonging to the
“Left”. But Mr. Shingaryov remained silent on the fact that three
quarters of these closest friends and political comrades-in-arms of the
Cadets are themselves Octobrists.

He wants democrats to regard the Cadets as “Lefts” not withstanding the permanent and very close bloc that actually
exists between the Cadets and the Progressists, who stand half way
between the Cadets and the Octobrists! In other words—the Cadets are
angling for the democrats although they are themselves actually held in
captivity by the Progressists, who are notoriously anti-democratic.

“ The torpor reminds one of the stale of passengers in a train that has been held up at a wayside station,” said
Mr. Shingaryov, speaking of the Fourth Duma. “To shake off their torpor
and get the train going the passengers would have to clear the way
themselves. But to get the heavy Legislative machine going, the strength
of the passengers alone is not enough. There are three padlocks on our
re forms—the law of June 3, the upper chamber and the fact that the
executive authorities are not responsible. How these three padlocks will
be opened, whether in peace and quietness or in some other way, history
will show. Our contemporaries cannot remain absolute non-participants;
they must all pull together” ( Rech No. 70).

References to history are convenient! Mr. Shingaryov and the Cadets
refer to history in the same way as those people about whom Marx
said that they defend the whip because it is a historical
whip. [4] “ History will,” of course, “show how the padlocks will be
opened”; that is an incontestable and fruitless truism. It is an excuse
deriving from senile decay. A politician must be able to say which
class owns the padlocks and which classes must open them and
by what means .

“ History will show” exactly what it showed seven and a half years
ago—the fruitlessness of liberal reformism and liberal dreams of living
in peace with the class that owns the “padlocks”.

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Notes:
[1]
Cadets —members of the Constitutional-Democratic Party —the chief party of the liberal-monarchist bourgeoisie in
Russia, founded in October 1905. The Cadets called themselves the “party
of people’s freedom”, but in reality strove to come to terms with the
autocracy in order to retain tsarism in the form of a constitutional
monarchy. At the time of the First World War (1914–18) they demanded “war
till victory is won”. After the victory of the February Revolution they
came to terms with the S.R. and Menshevik leaders of the Petrograd Soviet
and as a result acquired a leading position in the bourgeois Provisional
Government where they pursued an anti-popular, counter-revolutionary
policy. Following the October Socialist Revolution they acted as the
agents-of foreign imperialism and were the organisers of the internal
counter-revolutionary forces. Lenin called the Cadet Party the all-Russian
headquarters of the counter-revolution.

[2]
Octobrists —members of the Union of October Seventeenth —a party that took shape after the publication of the
tsar’s Manifesto of October 17, 1905. It was a counter-revolutionary party
that represented the big bourgeoisie and big capitalist farmers. Its
leaders were the well-known industrialist and Moscow house-owner,
A. Guchkov, and the big landed proprietor M. Rodzyanko. The Octobrists gave
full support to the domestic and foreign policy of the tsarist government.

[3]
Rech ( Speech) —the central daily newspaper of the
Cadet Party that was published in St. Petersburg from February 1906
onwards. It was suppressed by the Military-Revolutionary Committee of the
Petrograd Soviet on October 26 (November 8), 1917, but continued to appear
under other names until August 1918.

[4]
Lenin here refers to a statement by Marx in his Introduction to A Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right : “A school that
legitimises the vileness of today by the vileness of yesterday, a school
that declares every cry of the serf against the whip to be rebellious since
the whip is an ancient, hereditary, historical whip ... that historical school of law would have invented German history if it had not itself
been invented by German history.” (See Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels,
Werke , Bd. 1, S. 380, Dietz Verlag, Berlin, 1956.)