V. I.

Lenin

The First of May [1]

RUSSIAN SOCIAL-DEMOCRATIC LABOUR PARTY

Workers of ALL Countries, Unite)

Comradesworkers! The great holiday of the workers of all the world is
coming. On the First of May they celebrate their awakening to light and
knowledge, their association in one fraternal union for the struggle against all
oppression, against all tyranny, against all exploitation, for a socialist
system of society. All who work, who feed the rich and the nobility by their
labour, who spend their lives in back breaking toil for scanty wages, who never
enjoy the fruits of their own labour, who live like beasts of burden amidst the
luxury and splendour of our civilisation—all stretch out their hands to
fight for the emancipation and happiness of the workers. Down with enmity
between workers of different nationalities or different creeds! This enmity can
only benefit the plunderers and tyrants, who live by the ignorance and disunion
of the proletariat. Jews and Christians, Armenians and Tatars, Poles and
Russians, Finns and Swedes, Letts and Germans—all, all of them
march together under the one common banner of socialism. All workers
are brothers, and their solid union is the only guarantee of the well-being and happiness of all
working and oppressed mankind. On the First of May this union of the workers of
all countries, international Social-Democracy, reviews its forces and gathers
its strength for a further unremitting and unswerving struggle for freedom,
equality, and fraternity.

Comrades!We stand now in Russia on the eve of great events. We are engaged in
the last desperate fight with the autocratic tsarist government, we must carry
this fight on to its victorious end. See what calamities this government of
brutes and tyrants, of venal courtiers and hangers on of capital, has brought
upon the entire Russian people! The tsarist government has plunged the Russian
people into an insane war against Japan. Hundreds of thousands of young lives have been torn
away from the people to perish in the Far East. Words cannot describe all
the calamities that this war brings upon us. And what is the war for? For
Manchuria, which our predatory tsarist government has seized from China!
Russian blood is being shed and our country ruined for the sake of foreign
territory. Life is becoming harder and harder for the workers and
peasants; the capitalists and officials keep tightening the noose round
their necks, while the tsarist government is sending the people out to
plunder foreign territory. Bungling tsarist generals and venal officials
have led to the destruction of the Russian. fleet, squandered hundreds and
thousands of millions of the nation’s wealth, and lost entire armies, but
the war still goes on, claiming further sacrifices. The people are being
ruined, industry and trade are coming to a standstill, and famine and
cholera are imminent; but the autocratic government in its blind madness
follows the old path; it is ready to ruin Russia if only it can save a
handful of brutes and tyrants; it is launching another war besides the one
with Japan—war against the entire Russian people.

Neverbefore has Russia experienced such an awakening from her slumber, from
her oppression and enslavement, as she is experiencing today. All classes of
society are stirring, from the workers and peasants to the landlords
and capitalists, and voices of protest have been raised everywhere, in
St. Petersburg and the Caucasus, in Poland and Siberia. Everywhere the people demand an end to the
war; they demand the establishment of a free people’s rule, the convocation of
deputies of all citizens without exception in a Constituent Assembly to
institute a people’s government and save the nation from the abyss into which
the tsarist government is pushing it. Workers of St. Petersburg, about two
hundred thousand strong, went to the tsar on Sunday, the Ninth of January, with
the priest Georgi Gapon in order to submit these demands of the people. The tsar
received the workers as enemies. He shot down thousands of unarmed workers in
the streets of St. Petersburg. The struggle is now on all over Russia. Workers
are on strike, demanding freedom and a better life. Blood is being spilt in Riga
and in Poland, on the Volga and in the South. Everywhere the peasants are rising. The struggle for freedom is becoming the struggle of the entire people.

Thetsarist government has gone mad. It wants to borrow money to carry on the
war, but no one will trust it with a loan any longer. It promises to convene
representatives of the people, but actually everything remains unchanged; the
persecutions do not cease, the lawlessness of the officials proceeds as
before; there are no free public meetings, no freely circulated people’s
newspapers; the prisons in which fighters for the working-class cause are
languishing have not been thrown open. The tsarist government is trying to set
one people against another. It has brought about a massacre in Baku by
maligning the Armenians among the Tatars; now it is preparing a fresh massacre
aimed at the Jews by fanning hatred against them among the ignorant people.

Comradesworkers! We will tolerate no longer such outrageous treatment of the
Russian people. We will rise to defend freedom, we will strike back at all who
try to deflect the wrath of the people from the real enemy. We will rise up in
arms to overthrow the tsarist government and win freedom for the entire
people. To arms, workers and peasants! Hold secret meetings, form fighting
squads, get whatever weapons you can, send trusted men to consult with the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party! Let this year’s First of May be for us the
celebration of the people’s uprising, let us prepare for it and await the signal
for the decisive attack on the tyrant. Down with the tsarist government! We will
overthrow it and set up a provisional revolutionary government to convene a
Constituent Assembly of the people. Let people’s deputies be elected by
universal, direct, and equal vote, through secret ballot. Let all fighters for
freedom be released from prison or brought back from exile. Let public meetings
be held openly and people’s newspapers be printed without surveillance by the
accursed officials. Let all the people arm, let a rifle be given to every
worker, so that the people themselves, not a handful of plunderers, may decide
their own destiny. Let free peasants’ committees be set up in the countryside to
overthrow the serf-owning landlord power, to free the people from the hateful
oppression of the officials, to restore to the peasants the land that has been
taken away from them.

Thisis what the Social-Democrats want, this is,what they call upon you to fight
for, arms in hand: for complete freedom, for the democratic republic, for
the eight-hour day, for peasants’ committees. Prepare then for the great
battle, comrades workers, stop work in the factories and mills on the
First of May, or take up arms according to the advice of the committees of
the Social-Democratic Labour Party. The hour of the insurrection has not
yet struck, but it is not far off now. The workers of the world are now
looking with bated breath to the heroic Russian proletariat which has
offered incalculable sacrifices to the cause of freedom. The
St. Petersburg workers proclaimed on the famed Ninth of January: Freedom
or death! Workers of all Russia, we will repeat that great battle-cry, we
will not shrink from any sacrifices: through the uprising we will win
freedom; through freedom, socialism!

Longlive the First of May, long live international revolutionary
Social-Democracy!

Longlive the freedom of the workers and peasants, long live the democratic
republic! Down with the tsarist autocracy!

1905

Bureau of Committees of the Majority Editorial Board of “Vperyod”