V. I.

Lenin

October 4, 1905

Dear Mikhail Andreyevich, I am very grateful to you for your letter, which gives
me even more information than Felix Alexandrovich did in his report of a talk with you, as to the plans and tactics
of our so-called
Cadets. [1] It was extremely valuable to have your communication that the liberals, Witte, etc.,
are in deadly fear of an active boycott. I have just received
news from Russia that an inter-Party conference of
Social-Democrats (both sections of the R.S.D.L.P., the Bund,
probably the Letts, etc.) [2] has been held. The active
boycott tactics have been finally adopted.

Your plan is not clear to me:
(1) Do you really think there is the slightest hope that the Cadets will refuse to
participate in an election to the Duma? I think there is none.
(2)
Don’t you think it better for us, if we are to conclude an
agreement with the radicals, to demand a million or so from them for the purpose of arming the Petersburg
workers, than to have an election to a Constituent Assembly
right now? What point will there be in holding an election
before or without a fight against Trepov?

Of course, this needs to be discussed in greater detail.
I pin my hopes, first, on the meeting you will be having
in Berlin over the next few days with one of my friends, [3]
and, second, on our meeting here with you about which
Felix wrote to us. Wishing you success in the struggle for
an active boycott.

Yours faithfully....

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Notes:
[1]
Cadets —Constitutional-Democratic Party, the leading party of
the liberal-monarchist bourgeoisie in Russia, which was founded
in 1905. They advocated a constitutional monarchy. During the
first Russian revolution of 1905–07, they styled themselves the
party of “people’s freedom”, while actually betraying the people’s
interests and holding secret talks with the tsarist government
on how to crush the revolution. As the Opposition Party in the
Duma, they strove to share power with the tsarist government and
supported it on all major issues of domestic and foreign policy.

During the First World War, Cadet leaders, among them
Milyukov, were the chief proponents of the annexationist policy
of Russian imperialism. After the February revolution of 1917,
they entered the bourgeois Provisional Government and fought the
revolutionary movement of workers and peasants; they stood
up for the landed estates and wanted to force the people to
continue the imperialist war. After the victory of the October
Socialist Revolution, the Cadets took part in the counter-revolutionary
armed struggle against Soviet Russia.

[2]
The conference of Social-Democratic organisations in Russia to
which Lenin refers was held in Riga on September 7–9 (20–22),
1905. It was called by the C.C., R.S.D.L.P. to work out the
tactics in respect of the Duma. It was attended by representatives
of the C.C., the O.C. of the Mensheviks, the Bund, the Lettish
Social-Democrats, the Social-Democrats of Poland and
Lithuania, and the Revolutionary Ukrainian Party. Over Menshevik
protests, the conference passed a resolution on active boycott
of the Bulygin Duma. The conference decisions were published in
Proletary No. 22 on October 24(11), 1905 (see KPSS v resolyutsiyakh ..., Part One, 1954, pp. 91–94). They are assessed in Lenin’s
articles “The First Results of the Political Alignment” and “The
Hysterics of the Defeated” (see present edition, Vol. 9, pp. 396–
404 and 405–07).

[3]
A reference to the meeting between M. A. Reisner and V. V.
Vorovsky.