V. I.

Lenin

Today’s newspapers report that a joint meeting of the Budget and Food committees
of the State Duma was held on Wednesday, June 21. The meeting discussed the
proposal of the Minister of the Interior and the Minister of Finance to appropriate
50 million rubles for famine relief. “The Committee resolved to recommend
that the State Duma assign 15 million rubles for immediate needs, the sum to be
taken from current expenditure, and to request the Cabinet to submit its views
on the question of reducing the estimated current expenditure by that
amount. The Cabinet’s proposal that an internal loan of 50 million rubles be
issued was rejected” ( Rech , [1]

June 22).

The question of appropriating funds for famine relief is an extremely important
one. Every intelligent citizen should watch the progress of this question
through all its stages with unremitting attention.

First of all we will remind the reader that the question that originally arose
in the State Duma was the following:

Would it be right to grant money to the government of pogrom-mongers, or should
the Duma itself take the whole business of famine relief into its own hands? At
first, Deputy Aladyin spoke in favour of the correct, i.e., the latter,
solution. He proposed that committees of the Duma be elected, that members of
the Duma be sent to the affected areas, that recourse should be made to
“free institutions”, and the money and the whole business of famine
relief concentrated in their hands. Not a kopek for the Gurkos and
Durnovos!— said Aladyin, amidst applause from the Left benches of the

Duma and cries of: Hear, hear! As we know, Aladyin did not keep to this correct
position. He soared very high, but eventually settled on the perch in the
Cadet hencoop. The Social-Democratic deputies made a mistake in not
expressing their views by strong speeches on this question. The Duma
adopted the Cadet formula of a motion to proceed to the next business.

Thus, the fundamental question of principle was settled on Cadet, landlord,
liberal lines. The Duma refused to be come the instrument of the revolution in
this matter. The Duma feared the people, dreaded an appeal to the people. In
principle, the Duma agreed to leave the business of famine relief in the hands
of the Gurkos and the pogrom-mongering Ministers. Thus, the Cadet Duma has shown
that it only wants to exercise pressure on the pogrom-mongers with the help of
the people, and not to fight on the side of the people against the
pogrom-mongers; that it only wants to curb the pogrom-mongers a little, but not
to remove them altogether.

The question has entered a second stage. How will the Cadets exercise pressure
on the pogrom-mongers now? Haggling has begun between the Committee of the Duma
and the Ministers. At the meeting of the Committee on June 21 the Minister of
the Interior and the Minister of Finance were present. The Duma that would have
no dealings with the people and with “free institutions”, that
refused to negotiate with the latter, began to negotiate with these
Ministers. “Not a kopek for the Right Honourable Ministers”—that was
merely a rhetorical flourish. Negotiations with the Right Honourable Ministers
have become a fact. The Ministers asked for permission to float a loan. The
Committee of the Duma refused. They demanded that the money be taken from this
year’s Budget, i. e., that certain harmful expenditure be reduced so
as to provide the necessary sum for famine relief. By this tactical device, this
flanking movement, the Duma is seizing a particle of right to control the State
Budget. The Budget was adopted without the consent of the representatives of the
people; but now a revision of the Budget with a view to reducing harmful
expenditure and obtaining funds for useful expenditure is being secured in a
roundabout way.

Such is the second stage of the question. The Cadets, that is, the party of the
liberal landlords and the liberal bourgeoisie, want to control the organs of the
old regime; they want to influence them, to clean them and paint them
up; to substitute the Nabokovs for the Stolypins. But they
don’t want to replace all these organs and institutions of the old,
police, feudal regime by tree institutions of the people, by officials
freely elected by the whole people. How is the money for famine relief to be
obtained? Who is to be entrusted with the expenditure of these millions? Three
main answers to these questions are offered by the three main political forces
of the present period. The government of police pogrom-mongers answers: Obtain
the money by floating a new loan, so as not to encroach on our police- pogrom
Budget. We, the police and pogrom-mongers, will spend the money. The working
class, and all the politically conscious peasants, answer: Let the people
themselves collect the money and spend it themselves through the medium of
“free institutions” really elected by the whole people and really
without any connection with the dirty police. These free institutions must be
used for developing a broad mass movement to transfer all power in the state,
and the whole “Treasury”, to the people. The liberal landlords and
the liberal bourgeoisie (“Cadets”) answer: We don’t want any “free
institutions”, we are afraid of them. The people would go “too
far”. Much better to remain with the old pogrom- mongers, and just clean
and scrub them a bit. Take the money from their Budget by cutting down harmful
expenditure. Entrust the expenditure of the money to this government of
pogrom-mongers, but try to bring them under our, that is, the liberal landlords’
control.

The answers are clear. So are the positions of the government, the bourgeoisie
and the proletariat. The only question is, whom will the peasants follow?

The liberal bourgeoisie, the Cadets, are wavering between the government and
the people. The position of the waverers is ambiguous. It is easy to say: Take
the money from the current Budget by cutting down harmful expenditure! But the
money is needed at once, and this operation requires the consent of the
Council of State and the head of the state. Hence, the Cadets must be counting
on obtaining the voluntary consent of the higher officials and the camarilla. What are the
Cadets’ calculations based on? On the possibility of a deal over the composition of the next Cabinet .

We must look reality straight in the face. It is useless playing the
hypocrite. It is useless playing hide-and-seek. The necessity of assigning money
for famine relief is being used as a counter in the haggling that is going
between the Cadets and the pogrom-mongers’ government, between the Cadets and
the camarilla. The Cadets, in effect, say to the pogrom-mongers: If you
gentlemen give way to us and appoint Muromtsev as Prime Minister instead of
Yermolov, we will give way to you and grant you 15 and perhaps all 50 millions
for famine relief, without any “dangerous” (for you pogrom-mongers
as well as us landlords) recourse to “free institutions” of the
people.

That is the true significance of the present events in the Duma . That
is the true significance of Mr. Yeshchin’s article in today’s issue of the Cadet
newspaper Rech , which the leading article in that paper commends, with
slight reservations, and in which the author argues that the Duma should grant
the pogrom-mongers’ government money, but “fence this grant round with all
the conditions that the Duma can reasonably demand”.

The political situation is clear. Our Social-Democratic deputies in the Duma are
now faced with a very serious task. Firstly, they must launch a major attack
against the Cadets when the Budget and Food Committee’s report comes up for
discussion. They must demand recourse to “free institutions” of the
people. They must open the eyes of the peasants to the reason why the Cadets,
among whom there are so many landlords, are afraid of the people who need
all the land—without any redemption payment—and complete freedom. They must insist on a vote being taken on their resolution on
this question, so that the party of the proletariat may be ensured of the
sympathy of all the toiling masses, and so that the wavering and cowardice of
the liberal landlords may be clearly and publicly exposed.

Secondly, when the Cadets defeat the proposal to have recourse to free
institutions, the Social-Democrats must launch a second attack from our next
fortified line. They must demand an explanation why the Committee (the joint

Budget and Food Committee) has not published all the details of their
negotiations with the Right Honourable gentlemen, the Ministers of the Interior
and of Finance. They must be well prepared for a far more thorough and resolute
criticism of the whole Budget than that made by the Cadets in the
Committee. Voices will then be heard from the rostrum of the Duma relentlessly
exposing the double game the Cadets are playing, exposing all the
“secrets” of the Russian Budget of the police pogrom-mongers—a
Budget which squanders tens and hundreds of millions on assistance for landlords
and capitalists, on military adventures, on “relief” for spies and
gendarmes, on rewarding all the high-placed heroes of the Manchurian
tragedy, [2] and on maintaining a horde of thieving officials who tyrannise over the
people. Voices will be heard from the rostrum of the Duma proving that
harmful expenditure amounts to much more than 15 or 50 millions.

The Cadets only want to exercise a little pressure on the government. The
pogrom-mongers will be the first to be called to account by the
Social-Democrats; but the Cadets, too, will have to answer for their attempt to
gloss over the profound antagonism between the camarilla and the people.

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Notes:
[1]
Rech ( Speech )—a daily newspaper, the central organ of the Cadets; it was published in St. Petersburg from February 1906. It
was closed down by the Revolutionary Military Committee on October 26 (November
8), 1917.

[2]
This refers to the tsarist generals responsible for the
defeat of the Russian army in Manchuria during the Russo-Japanese War
of 1904-05.