V. I.

Lenin

The Government’s Policy and the Coming Struggle

Abouteighteen months ago one of the humorous periodicals published by the
German Social-Democrats contained a cartoon strip of Nicholas II. The tsar was
depicted in military uniform and laughing. He was teasing a shaggy peasant with
a crust of bread, now putting it almost into his mouth, now snatching it
away. The face of the shaggy peasant now shone with a smile of satisfaction, now
frowned with vexation as the bread was snatched away just as he snapped at
it. The lettering on this crust of bread was “constitution”. The
last “scene” however, shows that the peasant, after a desperate
effort to bite off a morsel of bread, had bitten off the head of Nicholas
Romanov.

Thiswas a very apt cartoon. For some years, in fact, the autocracy has been
“teasing” the Russian people with a constitution, a constitution
that was just on the point of being “almost completely” granted,
only to be withdrawn and replaced the next moment by the same old tyranny, the
same police system of abuses and iniquities in a much worse form. How long is it
since we had almost the most democratic “parliament” in the world?
How long is it since the whole press was discussing the question of a Cadet
Cabinet as an immediate and real possibility? It is hard to believe that this
was only two or three months ago. A couple of ukases, manifestoes and
ordinances, and the old autocracy is again reigning supreme, the gang of
universally condemned, discredited and publicly execrated embezzlers, hangmen
and pogrom-mongers are hard at it again, heaping indignities upon the people,
wrecking, robbing, beating, gagging, poisoning the air with the unbearable
stench of serfdom.

Fromthe standpoint of the development of the revolutionary struggle of the
people, these rapid changes from short “days of freedom” to long
months of rabid reaction are due to the equilibrium which has set in between the
conflicting forces since last autumn. The autocracy is no longer strong
enough to rule the people, the people are not yet strong enough to
shake off this pogrom-mongering government. So the two conflicting forces stand
facing each other like rival armies, now resting from the struggle for a time in
order to recuperate, now hurling themselves anew into the battle against the
hated enemy.

Thepublicists of the Cadet press and the Novoye Vremya press [1] are essentially alike in their moralising estimate of these
vacillations. Both condemn and deplore the vacillation, indecision and wavering
of the government, and exhort it to be “firm”—one lot demanding
firmness in repression, the other demanding firmness in establishing the
promised constitution. None of them has any conception of the class struggle
that is changing the actual alignment of social forces.

Asthis struggle develops, class-consciousness and solidarity will inevitably
grow in the ranks of the revolution and in the ranks of reaction, and sharper
and more ruthless forms of struggle will inevitably be adopted. Nothing could be
more effective than these rapid transitions from “days of freedom”
to “months of shooting” in diminishing the ranks of the passive and
indifferent, in drawing new strata and elements into the struggle, in developing
the class-consciousness of the masses by throwing into vivid relief first one
and then another aspect of the autocracy through the various experiments which
have been made throughout Russia. The quicker and the sharper these transitions
occur, the sooner will matters come to a head owing to the inevitable
preponderance of the social forces on the side of freedom.

Theclass-conscious workers can therefore view quite unperturbed the
astoundingly rapid “progress” of the autocracy on the path of
repression. Keep it up, Messrs. Romanov, Trepov, Ignatyev and Stolypin! The
more zealously you keep to that path, the sooner will you exhaust your last
reserves. Do you threaten us with a military dictator ship, to put the whole of Russia under martial law? But it is certainly the revolution that stands to gain most of all from such martial
law. A military dictatorship and martial law will necessitate the
mobilisation of increasing masses of troops, but the repeated
mobilisations of the most “reliable” troops—the
Cossacks—have already caused greatly in creased discontent in the
ruined Cossack villages and have increased the “unreliability”
of these troops. Martial law costs money, and the autocracy’s finances are
already in a desperate condition. Martial law leads to increased
agitation among the soldiers and teaches the population to be undaunted even
by. the most “frightful” forms of repression; Poland and the
Baltic Provinces are eloquent proof of this.

Wesaid that the reaction is “threatening” us with a military
dictatorship. This, strictly speaking, is incorrect, for now, after the
introduction of military courts [2] in nearly all the provinces,
including the “border regions”, i.e., in 82 out of the 87 provinces
in the Empire, it is ridiculous to speak of a military dictatorship as a matter
of the future. It is already present, and a change in name, the use of a more
“frightful” word (“dictatorship” instead of “special emergency measures”), the appointment of a single dictator
cannot add one jot to the system of wholesale arrests, deportations
without trial, punitive expeditions, searching people in the street and shooting
by order of army officers. A military and police dictatorship already reigns in
Russia. These measures of repression have gone so far that revolutionaries who
have been accustomed to such “treatment” ever since the days of
Plehve, suffer from them relatively little; the brunt of them falls on the
“peaceful” population, whom the Stolypins are “agitating” with most commendable success.

Themeasures of repression carried out in the winter followed a real
revolutionary uprising with which the liberal-monarchist bourgeoisie had no
sympathy, and yet it was these measures that produced an all-opposition Duma
from which the revolutionary elements benefited most. The measures of
repression in the autumn follow upon a phase of legal “constitutionalism”. It cannot be that they will result
only in a more radical Duma.

Thegang of pogrom-mongers feels that repression is futile and is desperately
looking for support. On the one hand, the attempts to come to terms with the
Octobrists have failed; on the other, Pobedonostsev & Co. are preparing to make a clean
sweep of all “constitutions”. On the one hand, the universities are
being re-opened and the venal press is clamouring for a strong liberal
policy. On the other hand, even the congress of the Cadet Party is prohibited
(how Stolypin & Co. are helping those Cadets!), and the press is being
persecuted worse than under Durnovo. On the one hand—military courts; on
the other—a broadly conceived attempt to come to terms with the
rural bourgeoisie. [3]

Thegovernment feels that its only salvation lies in strengthening the rural,
muzhik bourgeoisie in the village communes as a bulwark against the mass of the
peasantry. But instead of approaching this objective with considered and
cautious steps, as Guchkov & Co. would have done, instead of stealing up to
it in a skilful and subtle way, as the Cadets are doing, the police
Derzhimordas [4] go about it so crudely, stupidly and clumsily that it is
more than probable that their whole “campaign” will end in a
fiasco. The peas ant bourgeois element is numerically weak, but economically it
is very strong in the countryside. Provision of land from landlords, as well as
other land, by redemption payments in accordance with the Cadet agrarian reform
would have given some slight satisfaction to the whole of the
peasantry and would have admirably achieved the aim towards which the autocracy is
“pushing forward” clumsily, namely:

it would have enormously strengthened the peasant bourgeoisie and made it a bulwark of
“order”.

The Romanovs, Trepovs, Ignatyevs and Stolypins, how ever, are too dense to see
this. In the Duma they brusquely refused to give land to the peasants and now
they are putting up crown and state lands for sale through the
officials. Whether this will actually induce the influential sections of the
rural bourgeoisie to take the side of the present government is a big
question, for the pack of officials will procrastinate, rob and take bribes as
the Romanovs and their gang have always done. That the masses of the peasantry
will get “heated up” more than ever when they hear about the sale of
crown and state lands is beyond doubt. In very many cases these sales will mean
that the peasants will have to pay more , for rent will be converted
into redemption payments. And to compel the peasants to pay more for their land is the best thing the government, could think of doing to facilitate our
agitation against the government. It is an excellent way to exasperate the
peasants more than ever and to swing them over to our slogan:
absolute refusal to make any payments for the land, the
whole of which must go to the peasants after the victory of the
revolution.

Thegovernment’s ineptitude in its flirtation with the peasant bourgeoisie is
due partly to the stupidity characteristic of every police government, and
partly to extreme shortage of funds. The finances are in a very bad way.
Bankruptcy threatens. Foreign countries are refusing to lend money. The internal
loan is not being taken up. It has to be forcibly and secretly raised
from the capital of the savings-banks, secretly because the
savings-banks depositors would be least of all disposed to buy government bonds
now. The autocracy’s lackeys are beginning to sense the inevitability of the
collapse of the gold currency and of unlimited issue of paper currency.

Keepit up, Stolypin & Co.! You are doing good work for us! You are rousing
the population better than we ourselves could do it. You have gone to the limit
with your measures of repression, thus demonstrating to all that the militant,
revolutionary onslaught, too, must go to the limit.