V. I.

Lenin

The Unity Congress of the R.S.D.L.P.

April 10 (23)-April 25 (May 8), 1906

4

Co-Report on the Question of the Attitude Towards the
State Duma

Comrades, I will not read you the Bolshevik resolution, as in all probability
you are all familiar with it.

( Nevertheless, in response to requests from delegates, the speaker reads the Bolshevik resolution again .) If you compare this
resolution with that of the Mensheviks, you will find the following
four main points of difference, or four main defects in the latter:

(1) The Menshevik resolution contains no appraisal of the elections, no
assessment of the objective results of our political experience in this
field.

(2) This resolution is permeated with an imprudent, to put it mildly, or
optimistic attitude towards the State Duma.

(3) The resolution does not clearly distinguish the various trends or parties
among the bourgeois democrats, from the point of view of our tactics towards
them.

(4) Your resolution proposes that a parliamentary group be formed under
conditions and at a time when the value of such a step for the proletarian
party cannot in any way be proved.

Such are the real disagreements between us, if we examine our disagreements
seriously, and not seize upon words or trivialities.

Let us examine these four points.

It is highly important to sum up our experience of the elections if we want to
base our conclusions on the actual alignment of political forces, and not on
general phrases about parliamentarism in general, and so forth. We have
advanced, and advance today, the very definite proposition that participation in the elections really means supporting the Cadets; that
participation is impossible without blocs with the Cadets. Do you analyse the
substance of this pro position? Do you examine the situation in the light of the
actual facts on this question? Nothing of the kind. Axelrod completely evaded
the first two points, and on the next two he made two contradictory
statements. At first he referred to blocs with the Cadets in general in the most
disparaging terms. Then he said that he would have no objection to such blocs,
provided, of course, they were not arranged by the old hole-and-corner methods
and backstairs agreements, but by public and direct methods visible to the
whole proletariat. This last “proposition” of Axelrod’s is a
magnificent specimen of “Cadet” dreaming, of real “pious
wishes” engendered by constitutional illusions. In reality we have no
constitution and no basis for open activities; what we have is Dubasov
“constitutionalism”. Axelrod’s dreams will remain empty dreams,
while the Cadets will obtain real benefit from the agreements, tacit or signed,
formal or informal.

And when people talk about our “self-elimination” from the
elections, they always forget that it was the political conditions and not our
desire that kept our Party out; kept it out of newspapers and meetings;
prevented us from putting up prominent members of the Party as candidates. In
these circumstances, parliamentarism is a futile and pitiful game rather than a
means of educating the proletariat. It is naive to take parliamentarism
“in its pure form”, as an “idea”, isolated from the real situation.

When people talk about the elections they usually forget that actually the
contest took place, on the basis of Dubasov constitutionalism, between two
strong “parties”—the Cadets and the Black Hundreds. The Cadets were
right when they told the voters that any split in the vote, any nomination of
“third” candidates, could lead only to the victory of the Black
Hundreds. Take the case of Moscow, for example. Guchkov receives, say, 900
votes and the Cadet, 1,300. It would have been enough for the Social-Democrats
to obtain 401 votes for the Black-Hundred candidate to win. Thus the Cadets
rightly understood the significance of Social- Democratic participation in the
elections (they gave the Moscow workers a seat in the State Duma as a reward for participating in the elections), while you Mensheviks misunderstand its
significance and thus indulge in an empty and idle dream. Either don’t
take up parliamentarism and don’t talk commonplaces about it, or take it
up seriously. Your present position is no use at all.

The second point. Axelrod in his speech even more glaringly revealed the
defects in the resolution that I have point ed to. The resolution speaks of
transforming the Duma into an instrument of the revolution. You regard the Duma
exclusively in the light of the pressure the government exercises on us, of the
government’s efforts to crush the revolution. We regard the State Duma as a
body that represents a definite class, as an institution that has a definite
party composition. Your argument is absolutely wrong, incomplete and
non-Marxist in its approach. You fail to take into account the Duma’s internal
structure, which is conditioned by the class composition of the Cadet Party. You
say that the government is strangling the revolution, but you forget to add that
the Cadets have already fully displayed their desire to extinguish it. A Cadet
Duma cannot but display the characteristics of the Cadet Party. You completely
overlook the example of the Frankfurt Parliament which, although a
representative institution in a revolutionary period, betrayed an obvious
desire to extinguish the revolution (owing to the petty-bourgeois
narrow-mindedness and cowardice of the Frankfurt windbags).

The reference to “authority recognised by the tsar and established by
law”, is most unfortunate in a Social-Democratic resolution. The Duma is
not really an authority. The reference to the law does not strengthen, but
weakens your whole argument and all your agitational slogans that follow from
this resolution. Witte will most readily of all appeal to the “law”
and to the “will of the tsar”, in thwarting the slightest attempt of
the Duma to go beyond the ridiculously narrow limits of its powers. Not the
Social-Democrats, but Russkoye Gosudarstvo stands to gain by these
references to the tsar and the law.

I come now to the third point. A fundamental mistake in the resolution, and one
closely connected with all the preceding ones, is the absence of a clear
characterisation of the Cadets, the refusal to expose all their tactics, the
failure

to draw a distinction between the Cadets and the peasant and revolutionary
democrats. Yet it is the Cadets who are masters of the situation in the present
Duma. And these Cadets have already revealed more than once their betrayal of
the “people’s freedom”. When, after the elections, the amiable
windbag Vodovozov, wanting to be more Left than the Cadets, reminded the latter
of the promises they had made about a constituent assembly, and so forth,
Rech , adopting a “Great Power” tone, rudely and coarsely
told him that it did not need gratuitous advice.

And your resolution is equally mistaken as regards the striving to weaken the
revolution. As I have already said, this striving exists not only in the
government, but also in those petty-bourgeois compromisers who are now making
the most noise on the surface of our political life.

Your resolution says that the Duma is trying to lean on the people. This is only
half true, and therefore not true at all. What is the State Duma? Is it
tolerable that we should confine ourselves to general references to this
institution, instead of analysing the classes and parties that actually
determine its content and significance? Which Duma is striving to lean on the
people? Not the Octobrist Duma, be cause such a striving is totally alien to the
Octobrists. And not the peasant Duma, for the peasant deputies are an
inseparable part of the people, and there is no need for them to “strive to
lean on the people”. The striving to lean on the people is
characteristic precisely of the Cadet Duma. But characteristic of the
Cadets is both their striving to lean on the people and their tear of
independent revolutionary activity by the people. By pointing to one aspect of
the question and saying nothing at all about the second, your resolution
presents not only a wrong, but a positively harmful picture. Objectively, silence
on this second aspect—which is emphasised in our resolution on the
attitude to be adopted towards other parties—is the utterance of a lie.

In defining our tactics towards the bourgeois democrats we cannot possibly
remain silent about the Cadets, or refrain from criticising them sharply. We
can, and must, seek the support only of the peasant and revolutionary democrats,
and not of those who try to blunt the political contradictions of the present
time.

Lastly, let us glance at the proposal to form a parliamentary group. Even the
Mensheviks dare not deny that Social- Democrats must handle this new
weapon, “parliamentarism”, very cautiously. They are quite
ready to admit this “in principle”. But the point now is not
admitting things in principle; the point is to make a correct appraisal of
concrete conditions. Recognition of caution “in principle” is
worth less if actual conditions transform this recognition into innocent
and idle dreams. The comrades from the Caucasus, for example, talk very
finely about independent elections, about purely Party candidates and
about repudiating blocs with the Cadets. But what are these fine phrases
worth when—as one of the comrades from the Caucasus in formed me in
conversation—in Tiflis, that Menshevik stronghold in the Caucasus,
the Left Cadet Argutinsky will probably be elected and, probably, not
without the aid of the Social-Democrats? What good are our wishes for
public and open statements before the masses if we only have—as we
have now—the Partiiniye Izvestia of the Central Committee
against a host of Cadet newspapers?

Note also that even the most optimistic Social-Democrats hope to get their
candidates elected only through the peasant curia. Thus they want to
“start parliamentarism” in the practice of the workers’ party with
the petty-bourgeois, semi-Socialist-Revolutionary curia and not with the
workers’ curia. Just think, which has most chance of emerging out of this
situation—a Social-Democratic or a non-Social-Democratic workers’ policy?

---
Notes: