V. I.

Lenin

Wehave already made it clear more than once that the autocracy’s struggle
against the proletarian and peasant revolution inevitably hits the liberal
opposition too. Once the proletariat is silent, the pogrom-mongers’ government
will certainly not miss the opportunity to strangle the Cadets as well. It is
now engaged in throttling the Peaceful Renovators. At present it is looking none
too kindly even on the Octobrists. And if—thanks to the military
courts— even the crack of Brownings, the bursting of bombs and the
classical command: “Hands up!” cease for a while, it will be no guarantee,
of course, that the Cadets and the Peaceful Renovators will, at last, reach
their longed for peaceful haven of legal, constitutional struggle.

Onemight have thought that the tide of frantic reaction would have swept the
leaders of the liberal opposition far to the left. The dissolution of the Duma
has completely undermined constitutional illusions. There is not a member on the
staff of Tovarishch or Stolichnaya Pochta [1] who could fail to see that now. The suppression of the Cadet press (the
whole of the provincial and a considerable part of the metropolitan press), the
banning of the congress, the refusal to legalise the party, the prosecution of
all the signatories of the Vyborg Manifesto, should, one would think, have
forced the Cadets to abandon the policy of organising public opinion and to
adopt, at last, the policy of organising the social forces. Furthermore, one
would think that if the Cadet leaders lack the heroic determination proudly to
go under ground, the whole following would there and then abandon such leaders.

The Cadet Congress has shown these calculations to be wrong. For the time
being, at any rate. The Congress has sanctioned, though reluctantly, the
policy of “marking time” or, more precisely, “don’t move”, proposed by the Central Committee. The Congress adopted a
resolution on organising the social forces, but this was a purely platonic
resolution, committing no one to anything, not even giving any indication of the purpose for which such forces could and should
be organised. The Congress passed—by a relatively slight majority, it
is true—the celebrated Point 4 of the resolution on tactics, which
proclaims the party’s passive resistance to the passive resistance that is
growing spontaneously among the masses of the people and is recommended by
the Vyborg Manifesto. The Congress closed as the congress of the single and
indivisible “party of people’s freedom”.

Nor,undoubtedly, could it have been different. The hour has not yet struck for
a split in the Cadet Party. While class contradictions have already irrevocably
driven large sections of the big bourgeoisie into the camp of open counter
revolution, they have not yet caused sufficient disintegration in the wide
sections of the middle and petty bourgeoisie who voted for the Cadets at the
elections. So far, there are no objective signs that the lower middle class in
the provinces has been infected with that bourgeois dread of revolution which
has already possessed the “gallows humanists” of the Guchkov type.

Butthis disintegration is progressing rapidly. And the Cadet leaders themselves
are not sure, of course, whether their motley “people’s freedom”
bloc will stand the test of the social and political struggle, which is
growing more and more acute.

The Russian revolution is certainly bound to reach that fatal boundary line,
beyond which the break-up of this bloc will be absolutely inevitable. That line
will be reached and crossed when the vortex of proletarian and peasant
uprising irrevocably draws into itself the broadest strata of the petty
bourgeoisie and part of the middle urban bourgeoisie. Then, but only
then, all that will actually remain of the huge Cadet bloc will be the
propertied middle bourgeoisie, who were surely destined at their birth to
share, in the long run, Mr. Guchkov’s bourgeois fears. Then the spectre of national revolution which is still so potent at the present time, and which
is preventing many people from properly appraising the truly gigantic
constructive role of the class contradictions in the Russian revolution, will
vanish. When this boundary line is reached, a huge political party basing itself
on the organisation of public opinion will be a hopeless anachronism;
while all the elements of the real mass movement, both on the left and on the
right, will assign to force, naked physical force, that great, not only
destructive but also constructive role, without which, of course, the real con
summation of revolution is inconceivable. But where physical force comes into
its sovereign rights there is no place for Cadet bourgeois hegemony. The whole
history of our struggle bears witness to that fact; one need not be a prophet to
predict for certain that the same thing will happen if we experience a new
upsurge of the revolution. The Cadet is a “legitimate” participant
in the division of the spoils of the revolution—but he is no more than
that.

Thatis why, objectively, those Cadet leaders were right who proposed that the
Vyborg Manifesto be regarded simply as a mistake committed in the heat of the
moment since it directly calls for the adoption of the tactics of
passive resistance. For considering the intensity of the struggle today there
cannot be any mass passive resistance that will not immediately develop into an
active offensive. Mr. Struve is quite right when he says that such a civilised
method of struggle (as opposed, if you please, to the purely revolutionary,
aggressive method) is appropriate only against a civilised, constitutional
government. Who will doubt for a moment that the Stolypin gang will send out its
punitive expeditions at the very first signs of a mass refusal to pay taxes, or
a mass refusal to assign recruits for the army? Who will then stop the
population from defending itself, from passing to an active armed offensive?

Andthe Vyborg Manifesto, even at the very moment it was being signed, in its
purely Cadet interpretation, was at best only a threat to the government that
this would happen, and not a practical slogan. In this case, the Milyukovs and
Struves are really not to blame for the political simplicity of those provincial
Cadets who mistook this manifesto for a practical slogan. The fate of the
manifesto in the provinces bears witness to this. The intimidated press spoke very little and very
obscurely about this fate, but what it did say proves, we think, that the
party of “people’s freedom”, as a party, has worked hard to
apply the principle of passive resistance proclaimed by that manifesto to
the manifesto itself. That being the Case, the Congress could only endorse
this standpoint of the Cadets. The minority of the Congress, which at
first was inclined to make some fuss over this endorsement, finally
surrendered and remained in the party.

Onthe other hand, we get news every day from the interior of the country
that the idea of passive resistance has found a response among the mass of the
people. Non-payment of taxes, refusal to assign recruits, and boycott of the
authorities are beginning to become really practical slogans. No one is shutting
his eyes to the enormous organisational defects of this growing movement. No one
will deny that a certain amount of chaos is inevitable. But out of this chaos
will come order, the order of revolution, which is the highest stage of
chaotic, spontaneous popular outbreaks. The hatred of the masses who are today
seething under the tremendous pressure of the military-court constitution
cannot but break out, and here and there is actually breaking out in explosions
of open armed struggle. We do not have the data enabling us to predict for
certain that when the time comes for calling up recruits and collecting taxes an
uprising of the whole people will break out, even if only in the form of purely
passive resistance, but that there will be manifestations of such a struggle is
inevitable. And the Cadets are stepping aside in good time. “Our
conscience does not allow us to endorse this dangerous opinion”—declared
the Cadet Congress through Madame Tyrkova, a member of the Central Committee of
the Party.

Butthis invocation of conscience in no way alters the case. Even if approaching
events indicated with mathematical certainty the early triumph of a popular
revolution, the attitude of the leading circles of the Cadets would be no
different. This is proved by the whole past history of the Cadet Party, and the
negotiations with the pogrom-mongers for portfolios in the Cabinet marked the
culminating point of this history; objectively, they were far more
characteristic of it than the Vyborg Manifesto. One of the most authoritative representatives of the Party, Professor Gredeskul, testifies to this in
the most definite manner ( Rech , No. 180):

“We have lived with our people,” he says. “We have shared their
stormy impulses.” But that was the time of “boisterous, impetuous
youth”; now we have reached the age of “persistent and persevering
maturity”. And the palladium of this maturity is the election campaign,
with a platform in the shape of the Duma’s reply to the address from the throne.

The Cadet Party has never shared the “stormy impulses” of the
people, and never could do so; the learned professor orated like this merely by
way of a rhetorical flourish. Nor has the Cadet Party, as represented by its
Congress, moved to the right. It remains where it was. It intends, as hitherto,
to take part in the present revolutionary crisis only insofar as it may
degenerate into a purely parliamentary crisis.

Wecan only welcome the clear and explicit terms in which the Congress framed
its resolutions to that effect. Of course, it will greatly disappoint those who
regarded the Vyborg Manifesto as an indication that the Cadets were
“beginning to turn to the left” and as a striking sign that the
Russian revolution was acquiring a nation-wide character.

Bydeclaring that it conceives the revolution only as a parliamentary struggle,
the Congress has put squarely before the broad democratic masses the question of
an open struggle for power. The whole course of the Russian revolution
indicates that the answer of these democratic masses to that question will differ
from that of the Cadets. And Social-Democrats must prepare for the moment when
that answer is forthcoming so that the urban and rural poor will find in the
Social-Democratic Party their natural leader in the period of revolution.

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Notes:
[1]
Stolichnaya Pochta ( Metropolitan Post )—a
Left-Cadet daily newspaper published in St Petersburg from October 1906 to February 1908.