V. I.

Lenin

1907

133

To:   ETIENNE AVENARD [1]

March 1(14), 1907

Dear M. Avenard, Thank you for your letter.

I would ask you to make the following corrections:

(1) Page 6 (No. 1). You quote me as saying: “not to work for the
bourgeois revolution which would dupe the working class”.

This is most inaccurate. We Social-Democratic revolutionaries
must not only work for the bourgeois revolution but we must lead
it, direct it, together with the peasantry , against tsarism and
against the liberals .

Perhaps it would be better to say: “... in joint work, not with the
liberal bourgeoisie, who want to put an end to the revolution, but with the
democratic peasantry, against the baseness and treachery of the
bourgeoisie, who are day by day becoming more and more counter
revolutionary”.

We Bolsheviks also stand for the participation of the proletariat in the bourgeois revolution. But we believe, with Karl
Kautsky, that it is precisely together with the peasants and by no means
with the liberals that the proletariat can carry the bourgeois revolution
to a victorious conclusion.

(2) Pages 3–4.

Stolypin’s article in Novoye Vremya [2] appeared on January 4 (old style) and not on January 6.

(3) It is necessary to add that Milyukov visited Stolypin on
January 15 .

(4) The last words of your article: “... countless masses of peasant
proletarians .”

Not “peasant proletarians” but “democratic peasants”. In the social
(socialist) revolution we can count only on the proletarians of the cities
and the proletarians of the countryside. At the present time, however, we
have not a social revolution in Russia, but a bourgeois
revolution. And it is only the proletariat together with the peasants,
together with the democratic peasantry, together with the broad masses of
the peasantry, who can bring such a revolution to victory.

Yours,
N. Lenin

P.S. I received your letter very late. I have only a few minutes to
spare. Forgive this hurried reply.

---
Notes:
[1]
Etienne Avenard was a correspondent of l’Humanité who had
interviewed Lenin on February 17 (March 2), 1907, on the subject, “Tactics
of the R.S.D.L.P. in the Election Campaign”, and sent the text of the
interview for Lenin to look over.

As can be seen from the interview as carried by l’Humanité
all of Lenin’s corrections and comments were taken into account by the
correspondent (see present edition, Vol. 12, pp. 145–51).

L’Humanité —a daily founded in 1904 by Jean Jaurès as the
organ of the French Socialist Party. During the imperialist world war
(1914–18) the newspaper took a social-chauvinist position.

In 1918 Marcel Cachin, the prominent leader of the French and
international working-class movement, became its political director. Since
December 1920, after the French Socialist Party split and the French
Communist Party was formed, the paper has been the Central Organ of the
latter.

[2]
Novoye Vremya (New Times)—a daily published in
St. Petersburg from 1868 to 1917. At first moderate liberal, it turned into
a mouthpiece of reactionary groupings of the nobility and the bureaucratic
officialdom after A. S. Suvorin became its publisher in 1876. From 1905 it
was the organ of the Black Hundreds.