V. I.

Lenin

An uprising and armed barricade fighting in Lodz, a bloody affray in
Ivanovo-Voznesensk, general strikes and shooting at workers in Warsaw and
Odessa, the ignominious end of the Zemstvo deputation farce—such are the
major political events of the past week. If we add to this what the Geneva
papers report today (June 28 [15]) concerning peasant disturbances in Lebedin
Uyezd, Kharkov Gubernia, the pillaging of five estates, and the dispatch of
troops to these places, we see, reflected in the events of a single week, the
character of all the main social forces, which is now so openly and clearly
revealing itself in the course of the revolution.

The proletariat has been in a constant state of unrest, especially since the
Ninth of January, never giving the enemy a moment’s respite. It is keeping up
its offensive mainly in the form of strikes, while avoiding direct clashes with
the armed forces of tsarism and preparing its forces for the great and decisive
battle. In the industrially more developed areas, where the workers are better
trained politically and where national oppression is added to the economic and
general political yoke, the tsarist police and troops are going out of their way
to incense and provoke the workers. And the workers, even those who are
unprepared for the struggle, even those who at first confined
themselves to defence, are now, through the proletariat of Lodz,
setting a new example, not only of revolutionary enthusiasm and heroism, but of superior forms of struggle. They
are still poorly, very poorly armed, and their uprising is still local, isolated from the general movement; nevertheless, they are making a step
forward, they are covering the city streets with scores of barricades
thrown up with amazing speed, they are inflicting serious losses on the
tsarist troops, they are putting up a desperate resistance in some of the
houses. The armed uprising is gaining in breadth and intensity. The new
victims of the tsar’s executioners—nearly 2,000 people have, been
killed or wounded in Lodz—are kindling intense hatred towards the
accursed autocracy in the hearts of hundreds of thousands of
citizens. The new armed clashes demonstrate more and more strikingly that
the decisive armed struggle of the people against the armed forces of
tsarism is inevitable. All these separate outbreaks form more and more
distinctly the picture of a widespread all-Russian conflagration. More and
more districts, even the most backward, are being drawn into the
proletarian struggle, and the zeal of the tsar’s myrmidons but serves the
revolution by turning economic conflicts into political conflicts, by
making the workers everywhere realise from their own hard lot that the
autocracy must be overthrown at all costs, and by making of them future
heroes and fighters of the popular uprising.

Armed uprising of the people! This is the slogan—advanced so resolutely by
the party of the proletariat, as represent ed by the Third Congress of the
Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party—which the very course of events,
the spontaneous process of expansion and intensification of the revolutionary
movement, powerfully impels. Away, then, with all doubts and vacillations. Let
it be realised by one and all, now and without delay, how absurd and
discreditable are all pretexts today for evading this urgent task of the most
energetic preparation of the armed uprising—how perilous it is to delay,
how vital it is to unite and co-ordinate the local uprisings which are breaking
out all over the country. Taken separately, these outbreaks are
ineffectual. The organised force of the tsarist government can crush
the insurgents group by group, if the movement continues to spread
from town to town and from district to district as slowly and sporadically as it has been doing
until now. But united, these outbreaks can converge into a mighty torrent of
revolutionary flame, which no power on earth will be able to withstand. This unity is on the way, it is coming by a thou sand paths we do not
know of or even suspect. These sporadic outbreaks and skirmishes are giving the
people a lesson in revolution, and our job is never to lag behind the exigencies
of the moment, but to be able always to point to the next, higher stage of the
struggle, deriving experience and instruction from the past and from the
present, and urging the workers and peasants on and on more boldly and more
broadly to the complete victory of the people, to the complete destruction of
the autocratic gang that is now fighting with the desperation of the doomed.

How often we would find people in the Social-Democratic, movement, particularly
in its intellectualist wing, who belittled the aims of the movement,
faint-hearts who have lost faith in the revolutionary energy of the working
class. Even now some think that because the democratic revolution is bourgeois
by its social and economic nature, the proletariat should not aspire to enact
the leading role in the revolution, to take the most energetic part in it, or to
put forward such advanced slogans as the overthrow of the tsarist regime and
the establishment of a provisional revolutionary government. Events are
teaching even these politically backward people. Events are bearing out the
militant conclusions that follow from the revolutionary theory of Marxism. The
bourgeois nature of the democratic revolution does not mean that this revolution
can benefit only the bourgeoisie. On the contrary, it is advantageous most of
all, and necessary most of all, to the proletariat and the peasantry. Events
are making it increasingly clear that only the proletariat is capable of waging
a determined struggle for complete liberty, for the republic, in
contradistinction to the unreliability and instability of the
bourgeoisie. The proletariat can become the leader of the entire people and win over the peasantry, which can
expect nothing from the autocracy except oppression and violence, and nothing
from the bourgeois friends of the people except betrayal and treachery. Because
of its class position in modern society, the proletariat can understand, sooner
than any other class, that, in the final analysis, great historic issues are
decided only by force, that freedom cannot be achieved without tremendous
sacrifices, that the armed resistance of tsarism must be broken and crushed by force of arms. Otherwise we shall never
live to see liberty, otherwise Russia will meet the fate of
Turkey—a long painful decline and disintegration, particularly
painful for all the toiling and exploited masses of the people. Let the
bourgeoisie abase itself and cringe, let it bargain and beg for sops, for
a wretched travesty of liberty. The proletariat will go into action and
lead with it the peasantry, which suffers under the vilest and most
intolerable conditions of serfdom and humiliation; it will march forward
to complete liberty, which can be made secure only by an armed people
basing itself upon revolutionary power.

Social-Democracy has not advanced the slogan of insurrection on the spur of the
moment. It has always fought, and will continue to fight, against revolutionary
phrase-mongering, and it will always demand a sober estimation of forces and an
analysis of the given situation. The Social-Democratic Party has ever since
1902 spoken of preparing the uprising, without ever confounding this work of
preparation with the senseless artificial improvisation of rebellions which
would merely dissipate our forces uselessly. And only now, after the Ninth of
January, has the workers’ party placed the slogan of insurrection on the order
of the day, only now has the necessity of the uprising and the urgency of
mobilising for it been recognised. The autocracy itself has made this slogan a
practical slogan of the working-class movement. The autocracy has given the
broad masses their first lessons in civil war. This war has begun, and it is
being fought on an increasingly wider front and with increasing intensity. We
have only to generalise its lessons, to explain the great significance of the
words “civil war”, to derive practical guidance from each encounter
in this war, to organise our forces and prepare directly and immediately all
that is necessary for a real war.

Social-Democracy does not fear to face the truth. It knows the treacherous
nature of the bourgeoisie. It knows that liberty will bring the workers, not
tranquillity and peace, but the new and still greater struggle for socialism, a
struggle against the present bourgeois friends of freedom. But in spite of
this—indeed, because of this—freedom is absolutely necessary to the
workers, more necessary to them than to anyone else. Only the workers are capable of fighting at the head of the people
for complete freedom, for a democratic republic. And they will fight for it to
the death.

Needless to say, ignorance and degradation are still wide spread among the
people; a good deal has yet to be done to develop the class-consciousness of the
workers, not to speak of the peasantry. But see how quickly the slave of
yesterday is straightening his back, how the spark of liberty is gleaming even
in his half-dimmed eyes. Look at the peasant movement. It lacks unity and
political consciousness, and we have only a faint inkling of its magnitude and
its character. But one thing we know: the class-conscious worker and the
peasant who is rising to the struggle will under stand each other upon the first
exchange of words; every ray of light will bring them closer together in the
struggle for freedom; they will then not surrender their revolution to
the contemptibly pusillanimous and selfish bourgeois and landlords—their
democratic revolution which can give them land and freedom, which can give the
working people every alleviation of their living conditions conceivable in
bourgeois society to enable them to continue the struggle for socialism. We need
but look at the central industrial region. How long is it since we thought it to
be sunk in deep slumber? How long is it since only a sporadic, partial, petty
trade union movement was considered possible there? And now a general strike has
broken out in that region. In the hundreds of thousands they have risen there,
and more are rising. Political agitation is spreading as never before. To be
sure, the workers there are still far behind the heroic proletariat of heroic
Poland, but the tsarist government is fast educating them; it is fast making
them “catch up with Poland”.

No, the general armed uprising of the people is no dream. The complete victory
of the proletariat and the peasantry in this democratic revolution is no idle
thought. And what great perspectives such a victory would open before the
European proletariat, which for so many years has been artificially held back
from the pursuit of happiness by the reactionary militarists and landlords! The
victory of the democratic revolution in Russia will be the signal for the
beginning of the socialist revolution, for a new victory of our brothers, the class-conscious proletarians of all countries.

How utterly contemptible, as compared with the mighty and heroic struggle of the
proletariat, was the exhibition of loyalty displayed by the Zemstvo men and the
Osvobozhdeniye gentry at the famous audience granted by Nicholas
II. These mountebanks got their deserts. Before the ink had dried on their
grovelling and rapturous reports of the tsar’s gracious words, the true meaning
of those words was revealed to all in new deeds. The censorship is on the ram
page. The newspaper Rus [1] has been suspended solely for publishing a more than moderate address. The police dictatorship headed by
Trepov is in its hey day. The tsar’s words are officially interpreted as a
promise to call a consultative assembly of representatives of the
people, with the ancient autocracy “rooted in the native
soil” remaining inviolate.

Prince Meshchersky’s opinion of the reception, published in Grazhdanin ,
proved to be right. Nicholas knew how to donner le change to the Zemstvo
men and the liberals, he wrote. Nicholas knew how to lead them by the nose !

The gospel truth! The leaders of the Zemstvo people and of the
Osvobozhdeniye crowd have been led by the nose. It serves them
right. They got what they deserved for their servile speeches, for their
concealment of their true decisions and ideas on the constitution, and for
their shameful silence after the tsar’s jesuitical speech. They have haggled for
a parody of freedom that will be “safe” for the bourgeoisie. All
have haggled—Shipov with Bulygin, Trubetskoi with Shipov, Petrunkevich and
Rodichev with Trubetskoi, and Struve with Petrunkevich and Rodichev. They are
haggling while agreeing “provisionally” to the purely Shipovian
programme of the Zemstvo delegation. These hucksters got what they asked
for—a kick from the military jackboot.

Surely, this humiliation of the leaders of the Russian bourgeois
Osvobozhdeniye trend should mark the beginning of the end! Surely,
those who have the making of sincere and honest democrats will now at
last turn their backs on that notorious Constitutional-Democratic Party. Surely
they ought to realise that they are hopelessly disgracing themselves and
betraying the cause of the revolution by supporting a “party”, the “Zemstvo group” of which crawls on
its belly before the autocracy, while the Osvobozhdeniye League repeats
the like before the Zemstvo group.

We greet the finale of the Zemstvo deputation. The mask has been torn
off. Choose, gentlemen of the landowning classes and of the bourgeoisie! Choose,
gentlemen of education and members of “leagues” of every
description: for revolution or for counter-revolution? for freedom or against
freedom? He who would be a true democrat must fight, he must break with the
grovellers and traitors, he must create an honest party that will have respect
for itself and for its convictions, he must take his stand firmly and
irrevocably on the side of the armed uprising. As for those who want
to continue the game of diplomatising, of withholding their true opinions, who want to bargain
and cringe, to make rhetorical threats believed by none and to go into raptures
at the promise of a post of Marshal of the Nobility from the deified
sovereign—as for such, let them be publicly branded with the unanimous
contempt of all believers in freedom.

Down with the bourgeois betrayers of freedom!

Long live the revolutionary proletariat! Long live the armed uprising for
complete freedom, for the republic, for the vital, urgent interests of the
proletariat and the peasantry!

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Notes:
[1]
Rus (Russia)—a bourgeois-liberal newspaper, which appeared at
intervals in St. Petersburg between December 1903 and June 1908
under different names: Rus, Molva (Hearsay ), and Dvadtsaty Vek (The Twentieth Century).