V. I.

Lenin

The revolutionary events in Moscow have been the first flashes of lightning in a
thunderstorm and they have lit up a new field of battle. The promulgation of the
State Duma Act and the conclusion of peace have marked the beginning of a new
period in the history of the Russian revolution. Already weary of the workers’
persistent struggle and disturbed by the spectre of “uninterrupted
revolution”, the liberal bourgeoisie has heaved a sigh of relief and
joyously caught at the sop thrown to it. All along the line a struggle has begun
against the idea of a boycott, and liberalism has turned openly towards the
right. Unfortunately, even among the Social-Democrats (in the
new- Iskra camp) there are unstable people who are prepared on
certain terms to support these bourgeois traitors to the revolution, and to take the State Duma
“seriously”. The events in Moscow, it may be hoped, will put the
sceptics to shame, and will help the doubters to make a proper appraisal of the
state of affairs on the new field of battle. Anaemic intellectuals’ dreams of
the possibility of popular elections under the autocracy, as well as illusions
harboured by dull-witted liberals regarding the State Duma’s crucial importance,
vanished into thin air at the very first major revolutionary action by the
proletariat.

Our information on the Moscow events is as yet (October 12, N. S.) very
meagre. It is confined to brief and often contradictory reports in foreign
newspapers, and to censor screened accounts of the beginning of the movement,
published in the legal press. One thing is certain: in its initial stage the
Moscow workers’ struggle proceeded along lines that have become customary
during the past revolutionary year. The working-class movement has left its imprint on the entire Russian
revolution. Starting with sporadic strikes it rapidly developed into mass
strikes, on the one hand, and into street demonstrations, on the other. In
1905 the political strike has become an established form of the movement,
developing before our eyes into insurrection. Whereas it took the entire
working-class movement of Russia ten years to reach its present (and of
course far from final) stage, the movement in certain parts of the
country has progressed in a few days from a mere strike to a tremendous
revolutionary outbreak.

The compositors’ strike in Moscow, we are informed, was started by politically
backward workers. But the movement immediately slipped out of their control, and
became a broad trade union movement. Workers of other trades joined in. Street
demonstrations by workers, inevitable if only for the purpose of letting
uninformed fellow-workers learn of the strike, turned into political
demonstrations, with revolutionary songs and speeches. Long suppressed
bitterness against the vile farce of “popular” elections
to the State Duma came to the surface. The mass strike developed into a mass mobilisation of
fighters for genuine liberty. The radical students appeared on the scene, who
in Moscow passed a resolution absolutely analogous to that of the St. Petersburg
students. In the language of free citizens, not of cringing officials, this
resolution very properly branded the State Duma as brazen mockery of the people,
and called for a struggle for a republic, for the convocation of a genuinely
popular and genuinely constituent assembly by a revolutionary provisional
government. The proletariat and progressive sections of the revolutionary
democrats began street fighting against the tsarist army and police.

This is how the movement developed in Moscow. On Saturday, September24 (October
7), the compositors were no longer alone—the tobacco factories and
electric trains were also at a standstill, and a bakers’ strike had begun. In
the evening big demonstrations were held, attended, besides workers and
students, by very many “outsiders” (revolutionary workers and
radical students no longer regarded each other as outsiders at open actions by
the people). The Cossacks and gendarmes did their utmost to disperse the
demonstrators, who kept reassembling. The crowd offered resistance to the police and the
Cossacks; revolver shots were fired and many policemen were wounded.

On Sunday, September 25 (October 8), events at once took a formidable turn. At
11 a. m. workers began to assemble in the streets, with the crowd singing the
Marseillaise . Revolutionary mass meetings were held, and printing-shops
whose staff refused to strike were wrecked. Bakeries and gunsmiths’ shops were
attacked, for the workers needed bread to live and arms to fight for freedom
(just as the French revolutionary song has it). It was only after stub born
resistance that the Cossacks managed to disperse the demonstrators. There was a
regular battle in Tverskaya Street, near the Governor General’s house. In front
of the Filippov bakery a crowd of bakers’ apprentices assembled. As the
management of the bakery subsequently declared, they were going out peacefully
into the street, after stopping work in solidarity with the other strikers. A
Cossack detachment attacked the crowd, who made their way into a house, climbed
on to the roof and into the garrets, and showered the soldiers with
stones. There began a regular siege of the house, with the troops firing on the
workers. All communication was cut. Two companies of grenadiers made a flank
movement, penetrated into the house from the rear, and captured the enemy’s
stronghold. One hundred and ninety-two apprentices were arrested, of whom eight
were injured; two workers were killed. There were injured among the police and
the troops, a captain of gendarmes sustaining fatal injuries.

Naturally, this information is extremely incomplete. According to private
telegrams, quoted in some foreign newspapers, the brutality of the Cossacks and
soldiers knew no bounds. The Filippov bakery management has protested against
the unprovoked outrages perpetrated by the troops. A reputable Belgian newspaper
has published a report that janitors were busy cleaning the streets of traces of
blood. This minor detail—it says—testifies to the seriousness of the
struggle more than lengthy reports can. On the basis of information from private
sources that has found its way into the press, Vorwärts [1] has stated that in Tverskaya Street 10,000 strikers clashed with an
infantry battalion, which fired several volleys. The ambulance service had its hands full. It is estimated
that no less than 50 people were killed and as many as 600 injured. The
arrested are reported to have been taken to army barracks, where they were
mercilessly and brutally manhandled, being made to run the
gauntlet. It is further reported that during the street fighting the
officers distinguished themselves by their inhuman brutality, even towards
women (a St. Petersburg cable from the special correspondent of the
conservative bourgeois Temps , dated October 10 [September 27]).

Information on the events of the subsequent days is more and more scanty. The
workers’ wrath mounted frightfully, the movement gathering momentum. The
government took all measures to ban or slash all reports. Foreign newspapers
have openly written of the contradiction between the reassuring news from the
official agencies (which at one time were believed) and the news transmitted to
St. Petersburg by telephone. Gaston Leroux wired to the Paris Matin
that the censorship was performing prodigies by way of preventing the spread of
news that might be in the least alarming. Monday, September 26 (October 9), he
wrote, was one of the most sanguinary days in the history of Russia. There was
fighting in all the main streets and even near the Governor General’s
residence. The demonstrators unfurled a red flag. Many were killed or injured.

The reports in other papers are contradictory. Only one thing is
certain—the strike is spreading and has been joined by most workers
employed at the big factories, and even in the light industries. The railwaymen
too have stopped work. The strike is becoming general. (Tuesday, October 10
[September 271, and Wednesday.)

The situation is extremely grave. The movement is spreading to St. Petersburg:
the workers of the San-Galli Works have already downed tools.

This is as far as our information goes to date. Any complete appraisal of the
Moscow events on the strength of such information is, of course, out of the
question. One still cannot say whether these events are a full-scale rehearsal
for a decisive proletarian onslaught on the autocracy, or whether they are
actually the beginning of this onslaught; whether they are only an extension of
the “usual” methods of struggle described above to a new area of Central Russia, or whether they are destined
to mark the beginning of a higher form of struggle and of a more decisive
uprising.

To all appearances, the answer to these questions will be forthcoming in the
near future. One thing is certain:

before our very eyes, the insurrection is spreading, the struggle is becoming
ever more widespread, and its forms ever more acute. All over Russia the
proletariat is pressing onward with heroic efforts, indicating now here, now
there, in what direction the armed uprising can and, undoubtedly, will
develop. True, even the present form of struggle, already created by the
movement of the working masses, is dealing very telling blows at tsarism. The
civil war has assumed the form of desperately stubborn and universal guerilla
warfare. The working class is giving the enemy no respite, disrupting industrial
life, constantly bringing the entire machinery of local government to a
standstill, creating a state of alarm all over the country, and is mobilising
ever new forces for the struggle. No state is able to hold out for long against
such an onslaught, least of all the utterly corrupt tsarist government, from
which its supporters are falling away one by one. And if the liberal-monarchist
bourgeoisie finds the struggle at times too persistent, if it is terrified by
the civil war and by the alarming state of uncertainty which has gripped the
country, the continuation of this state of affairs and the prolongation of the
struggle is a matter of the utmost necessity to the revolutionary
proletariat. If, among ideologists of the bourgeoisie, people are beginning to
appear who are set on smothering the revolutionary conflagration with their
sermons on peaceful and law-abiding progress, and are concerned with blunting
the political crisis instead of making it more acute, the class-conscious
proletariat, which has never doubted the treacherous nature of the bourgeois bye
of freedom, will march straight ahead, rousing the peasantry to follow it, and
causing disaffection in the tsar’s army. The workers’ persistent struggle, the
constant strikes and demonstrations, the partial uprisings—all these, so
to say, test battles and clashes are inexorably drawing the army into political
life and consequently into the sphere of revolutionary problems. Experience in
the struggle enlightens more rapidly and more profoundly than years of
propaganda under other circumstances. The foreign war is over, but the government is
obviously afraid of the return home of war prisoners and of the army in
Manchuria. Reports of the revolutionary temper of the latter are coming in
thick and fast. The proposed agricultural colonies in Siberia for officers
and men of the army in Manchuria cannot but increase the unrest, even if
these plans remain on paper. Mobilisation has not ceased, though peace
has been concluded. It is becoming increasingly obvious that the army is
needed wholly and exclusively against the revolution . Under such
circumstances, we revolutionaries do not in the least object to the
mobilisation; we are even prepared to welcome it. In delaying the denouement
by involving ever more army units in the struggle, and in getting more and
more troops used to civil war, the government is not doing away with the
source of all crises, but, on the contrary, is extending the field for
them. It is winning some respite at the price of the inevitable extension of
the field of battle and of rendering the struggle more acute. It is stirring
to action the most backward people, the most ignorant, the most cowed, and
the politically inert—and the struggle will enlighten, rouse, and
enliven these people. The longer the present state of civil war lasts, the
more inevitably will large numbers of neutrals and a nucleus of champions of
revolution be drawn from the ranks of the army of counter-revolution.

The entire course of the Russian revolution during the last few months shows
that the stage now reached is not, and cannot be, the peak stage. The movement
is still on the upgrade, as it has been ever since January 9. It was then that
for the first time we saw a movement that amazed the world with the unanimity
and solidarity of the huge masses of workers who had risen to advance political
demands. This movement was still quite devoid of revolutionary consciousness,
and helpless as regards arms and military preparedness. Poland and the Caucasus
have provided an example of struggle on a higher plane; there the proletariat
has partly begun to fight with weapons, and hostilities have assumed a
protracted form. The Odessa uprising was marked by a new and important factor
needed for victory—part of the forces went over to the side of the
people. It is true that this did not bring immediate success; the difficult task
of “co-ordinating operations of land and sea forces” (a most difficult task even for a
regular army) had not yet been accomplished. But the problem was posed, and by
all tokens the Odessa events will not remain an isolated incident. The Moscow
strike shows us the spread of the struggle to a “genuinely Russian”
region, whose reliability had so long delighted the hearts of the
reactionaries. The revolutionary action that has started in this region is of
enormous significance even if only for the fact that proletarian masses here,
who are receiving their baptism of fire, have been most inert and at the same
time are concentrated in a relatively small area in numbers unequalled in any
other part of Russia. The movement started in St. Petersburg, spread through all
the marginal regions of Russia, and mobilised Riga, Poland, Odessa, and the
Caucasus; the conflagration has now spread to the very heart of Russia.

The disgraceful farce of the State Duma appears all the more contemptible in
comparison with this genuinely revolutionary action by a class ready for battle
and truly progressive. The union of the proletariat and revolutionary democracy,
which we have spoken of on more than one occasion, is becoming a fact. The
radical students, who both in St. Petersburg and in Moscow adopted the slogans
of revolutionary Social-Democracy, are the vanguard of all the democratic
forces. Loathing the baseness of the “Constitutional Democratic”
reformists who have accepted the State Duma, these forces gravitate towards a
real and decisive struggle against the accursed enemy of the Russian people
rather than towards a policy of bargaining with the autocracy.

Look at the liberal professors, rectors, vice-rectors, and the entire company
of Trubetskois, Manuilovs, and their like. These people are the finest
representatives of liberalism and the Constitutional-Democratic Party, the most
enlightened, the best educated, the most disinterested, the least affected by
the direct pressure and the influence of the money-bag. And how do these best
people behave? What use did they make of the first authority they obtained,
authority they were invested with by election, their authority over the
universities? They are already afraid of the revolution, they fear the
aggravation and the extension of the movement, they are already trying to
extinguish the fire and bring about tranquillity, thereby earning well-merited insults in the form
of praise from the Princes Meshchersky.

And they were well punished, these philistines of bourgeois science. They
closed Moscow University, fearing a shambles on its premises. They merely
succeeded in precipitating incomparably greater slaughter in the streets. They
wanted to extinguish revolution in the University, but they only kindled it in
the streets. They got into a quandary, along with the Trepovs and the Romanovs,
whom they now hasten to persuade that freedom of assembly is needed:

If you shut the University—you open the way for street fighting. If you
open the University—you provide a platform for revolutionary mass
meetings which will train new and even more determined champions of liberty.

How infinitely instructive is the instance of these liberal professors for an
appraisal of our State Duma! Is it not clear now, from the experience of the
universities, that the liberals and the Constitutional-Democrats will tremble
for the “fate of the Duma” just as much as these miserable knights
of cheap-jack science tremble for the “fate of the universities”? Is it
not now clear that the liberals and the Constitutional-Democrats cannot use the
Duma in any other way save the purpose of still more extensive and still more
evil-smelling preaching of peaceful and law-abiding progress? Is it not clear
now how ridiculous are the hopes of transforming the Duma into a revolutionary
assembly? Is it not clear that there is only one method of
“influencing”—not specifically the Duma or specifically the
universities but the whole of the old autocratic regime—the method of the Moscow workers , the method of insurrection by the people? It is this
alone that will not merely force the Manuilovs in the universities to ask for
freedom of assembly, and the Petrunkeviches in the Duma to ask for liberty for
the people, but will win genuine liberty for the people.

The Moscow events have shown the real alignment of social forces: the liberals
scampered from the government to the radicals, urging the latter to desist from
the revolutionary struggle. The radicals fought in the ranks of the
proletariat. Let us not forget this lesson: it also bears directly on the State
Duma.

Let the Petrunkeviches and the other Constitutional-Democrats play at
parliamentarianism in autocratic Russia—the workers will wage a
revolutionary struggle for genuine sovereignty of the people.

Irrespective of how the insurrectionary outbreak in Moscow ends, the
revolutionary movement will in any case emerge even stronger than before, will
spread to a wider area, and gather new forces. Let us even assume that the
tsarist troops are now celebrating a complete victory in Moscow—a few more
such victories and the utter collapse of tsardom will become a fact. This will
then be the actual, genuine collapse of the entire heritage of serf-ownership,
autocracy, and obscurantism—not the flabby, craven, and hypocritical
patching up of tattered rags, with which the liberal bourgeois are trying to
delude themselves and others. Let us even assume that tomorrow’s post will bring
us the sad news that the insurrectionary outbreak has been crushed once
again. We shall then exclaim: once again—hail insurrection!