RADICAL STUDENTS AND PROFESSORIAL LIBERALISM IN THE DAYS OF OCTOBER 1905
[Between October 12 and 19, 1905]
Comparison of the manuscript of document "a" with the manuscript
of the article "a Political Strike and Street Fighting in Moscow" made it possible
to establish the presence of Lenin's notes, proving that doc.
"a" was intended by Vladimir Ilyich as an insertion into the specified article; at the same time, the place for insertion is precisely indicated
on both manuscripts. The article, however, was printed in No. 20
of "Proletary" without the insertion, but in the following (21st) issue
of the newspaper, the thoughts and even entire phrases of doc. "a" were included in a separate article by Lenin, "Lessons of the Moscow Events". (See Coll.
Works, vol. VIII, p. 504 note.
'154.)
26.

* SHAMEFUL COMEDY.
The shameful comedy of the State Duma seems even more contemptible alongside this truly revolutionary action of a class ready to fight and truly progressive.
The union of the proletariat with revolutionary democracy, which
we have spoken of more than once, is becoming a fact. Radical students, who in St. Petersburg and in Moscow adopted the slogans of revolutionary social democracy, are the vanguard of all democratic forces that disdain the meanness of the "constitutional
democratic" reformers who went into the State
Duma, who gravitate to a real decisive struggle

SHAMEFUL COMEDY
with the cursed enemy of the Russian people, and not to brokering with [him]
autocracy.
Look at the liberal professors, rectors, assistant rectors, and all this company of Trubetskoys, Manuilovs
and so on.
After all, these are the best people of liberalism and the Constitutional-Democratic party, the most ideological, the most
educated, the most disinterested, the most free from the direct
pressure of interests and the influence of the money bag.
And how do these best people behave? How did they take advantage of the first power, the power of governance in universities,
the power entrusted to them by election? They are already afraid of the revolution,
they are afraid of the aggravation and expansion of the movement, they are already putting out the fire and trying to bring calm, receiving for this fully
deserved slaps in the face in the form of praise from Prince Meshchersky.
And they were well punished, these philistines of bourgeois
science. They closed the university in Moscow, fearing a massacre at the university.
They only provoked even sooner an incomparably larger massacre in the street.
They wanted to [extinguish delay] extinguish the revolution at the university, they only [opened] ignited
the revolution in the street.
They got into good pincers, along with Messrs. Trepov and Romanov, whom they rushed
now to convince of the need for freedom of assembly: close
the university — open the street struggle.
Open the university — open a platform for popular revolutionary meetings, preparing new and even more decisive fighters for
freedom.
How infinitely instructive is the example of these liberal professors for assessing our State] Duma! Is it not clear
now, from the experience of higher schools, that liberals and Constitutionalists-Democrats will be just as afraid for the "fate of the Duma"
as these miserable [cowards of a farthing] knights of a halfpenny science are afraid
for the "fate of the universities"? Is it not clear now that liberals
and constitutionalists]-democrats] cannot use the Duma otherwise than for an even wider, even more stinking
sermon of peaceful legal progress? Is it not clear now how
ridiculous are the hopes of turning the Duma into a revolutionary assembly? Is it not clear that there is only one way to "influence" not the
Duma specifically, not the universities specifically, but the entire old autocratic order, the way of the Moscow workers, the way
of popular uprising [which]? It alone will not only force Ma-