V. I.

Lenin

What Are Our Non-Party Democrats Teaching the People? [3] “ The progressive press was unanimous in expressing its profound condolence
over the heavy loss sustained by Russia in the death of Count P. A. Heyden. The
fine personality of Pyotr Alexandrovich attracted all decent people
irrespective of party or trend. A rare, and happy lot!” There follows a
lengthy quotation from the Right Cadet Russkiye Vedomosti [4] containing a sentimental effusion on the life and
activities of that “wonderful man” by Prince P. D. Dolgorukov, one
of that Dolgorukov breed whose spokesmen bluntly confessed the roots of their
democracy: better come to terms with the peasants peacefully, than wait until
they seize the land themselves!... “We deeply share the feelings of
grief evoked by the death of Count Heyden in all who are accustomed to value
the man irrespective of the party guise in which he may be
invested. And the late Heyden was above all a man .”

So writes the newspaper Tovarishch , No. 296, Tuesday, June 19, 1907.

The journalists of Tovarishch are not only the most ardent democrats
of our legal press, but also consider themselves socialists—critical
socialists, of course. They are the nearest thing to Social-Democrats; and the
Mensheviks— Plekhanov, Martov, Smirnov, Pereyaslavsky, Dan, etc.,
etc.—are offered the most cordial hospitality in a paper whose columns
are adorned with the signatures of Prokopovich, Kuskova, Portugalov, and other
“former Marxists”. In a word, there is not the slightest doubt that
the journalists of Tovarishch are the most “Left” spokesmen
of our

“enlightened”, “democratic”, etc., society, to which narrow illegal activities are alien.

And when you come across lines like those quoted above it is difficult to
refrain from exclaiming to these gentlemen: How fortunate it is that we, the
Bolsheviks, obviously did not belong to Tovarishch s circle of
decent people !

Gentlemen, “decent people” of Russian enlightened democracy, you
are drugging the minds of the Russian people and infecting them with the miasma
of toadyism and servility a hundred times worse than those notorious members of
the Black Hundred—Purishkevich, Krushevan, and Dubrovin, against whom you
are waging such a zealous, such a liberal, such a cheap, such a, for you,
profitable, and safe war. You shrug your shoulders and turn to all the
“decent people” of your society with a scornful smile at the idea of
such “absurd paradoxes”? Yes, we know perfectly well that nothing on earth
can shake you out of your vulgar liberal complacency. And that is why we rejoice
that we have succeeded in all our activities in setting up a solid wall between
ourselves and the circle of decent people of Russian educated society.

Can one give any instance of the Black-Hundreds having corrupted and misled any
considerable section of the population? One cannot.

Neither their press nor their league, neither their meetings nor the elections
to the First and Second Dumas could provide any such instances. The outrages and
atrocities of the Black Hundreds, in which the police and the soldiery take
part, enrage the people. The frauds, dirty tricks, and bribes of the Black
Hundreds arouse hatred and contempt. With the help of government funds the
Black Hundreds organise gangs and bands of drunkards who can act only with the
permission and at the instigation of the police. In all this there is not a
trace of any dangerous ideological influence on any considerable sections of
the population.

On the other hand, it is just as unquestionable that such an influence is
exerted by our legal, liberal, and “democratic” press. The
elections to the First and Second Dumas, meetings, associations, and educational
affairs all go to prove this. And Tovarishch’s utterance in
connection with the death of Heyden clearly shows what kind of ideological influence this is.

“... A heavy loss ... fine personality ... happy lot ... was above all a
man .”

Count Heyden, the landlord, magnanimously played the liberal prior to the
October

revolution. [5] After the first victory of the people on October 17,
1905, he immediately, without the slightest hesitation, went over to the
counter revolutionary camp, to the Octobrist Party, the party of the
landlords and big capitalists, who were incensed with the peasants and
democracy. In the First Duma this noble character defended the government,
and after the dissolution of the First Duma negotiated, but without
reaching agreement, for a place in the Ministry. Such are the principal
stages in the career of this typical counter-revolutionary landlord.

And along come well-dressed, enlightened, and educated gentlemen, mouthing
phrases about liberalism, democracy, and socialism, and making speeches of
sympathy for the cause of liberty, the cause of the peasants’ struggle against
the landlords for land—gentlemen who possess a virtual monopoly of the
legal opposition in the press, in the associations, and at meetings and
elections—and, lifting up their eyes to heaven, preach to the people:
“Rare and happy lot!... The late Count was above all a man .”

Yes, Heyden was not only a man; he was also a citizen, able to understand the
common interests of his class and to defend those interests very skilfully. And
you, gentlemen, the enlightened democrats, you are just tearful simpletons,
concealing under a cloak of liberal idiocy your inability to be anything but
cultured lackeys of this landlord class.

There is no need to fear the landlords’ influence on the people. They will never
succeed in fooling any considerable number of workers or even peasants for any
lengthy period. But the influence of the intelligentsia , who take no
direct part in exploitation, who have been trained to use general phrases and
concepts, who seize on every “good” idea and who sometimes from
sincere stupidity elevate their inter-class position to a principle of
non-class parties and non-class politics—the influence of this bourgeois intelligentsia on the
people is dangerous. Here, and here alone, do we find a contamination of the
masses that is capable of doing real harm and that calls for the utmost exertion
of all the forces of socialism to counteract this poison.

“ Heyden was an educated, cultured, humane, and tolerant
man”—ecstatically exclaim the liberal and democratic droolers, imagining
that they have raised themselves above all “partisanship” to the
standpoint “common to all mankind”.

You are mistaken, most worthy sirs. This is not a stand point common to all
mankind but a common servile stand point. The slave who is aware of his slavish
condition and fights it is a revolutionary. The slave who is not aware of his
slavish condition and vegetates in silent, unenlightened, and wordless slavery,
is just a slave. The slave who drools when smugly describing the delights of
slavish existence and who goes into ecstasies over his good and kind master is a
grovelling boor. And you, gentlemen of Tovarishch , are just such
boors. With disgusting complacency you wax sentimental over the fact that a
counter-revolutionary landlord, who supported the counter-revolutionary
government, was an educated and humane man. You do not realise that instead of
turning the slave into a revolutionary you are turning slaves into
grovellers. All your talk about freedom and democracy is sheer claptrap, parrot
phrases, fashionable twaddle, or hypocrisy. It is just a painted signboard. And
you yourselves are whited sepulchres. You are mean-spirited boors, and your
education, culture, and enlightenment are only a species of thoroughgoing
prostitution. For you are selling your souls, and you are selling them not
through need, but for “love of the thing”.

Heyden was a convinced constitutionalist, you say sentimentally. You are lying,
or else you have been completely hoodwinked by the Heydens. Publicly, before
the people, to call a man a convinced constitutionalist when that man is known
to have founded a party which supported the government of Witte, Dubasov,
Goremykin, and Stolypin, is like calling a cardinal a convinced opponent of the
pope. Instead of giving the people a correct idea of the constitution you, the
democrats, treat the constitution in your writings as something in the nature of salmon mayonnaise. For there
can be no doubt that for the counter-revolutionary landlord the
constitution is a sort of salmon mayonnaise, a means of perfecting the
method of plundering and subjugating the muzhik and the masses of the
people. If Heyden was a convinced constitutionalist, then Dubasov and
Stolypin as well were convinced constitutionalists, for in practice Heyden supported their policy. Dubasov and Stolypin
could not have been what they were and could not have pursued their policy
without the support of the Octobrists, Heyden among them. By what tokens
then, 0 ye sage democrats from among “decent” people, are we to
judge the political physiognomy of a man (a “constitutionalist”) by his speeches, by the fact that he beats
his breast and sheds crocodile tears? Or by his actual deeds in the social
arena?

What is characteristic and typical of Heyden’s political
activities? Is it that he could not reach agreement with Stolypin about joining
the Ministry after the dissolution of the First Duma? Or is it that after such
an act he proceeded to negotiate with Stolypin at all? Is it that
formerly, at one time or another, he uttered some kind of liberal phrases? Or is
it that he became an Octobrist (=a counter revolutionary) immediately after
October 17? In calling Heyden a convinced constitutionalist, you teach the
people that the former is characteristic and typical. And that means that you
are senselessly repeating fragments of democratic slogans without understanding
the rudiments of democracy.

For democracy—remember this, you decent gentlemen and members of
respectable society—means fighting against that very domination over the
country by counter-revolutionary landlords which Mr. Heyden upheld and of which
he was the embodiment throughout his political career.

Heyden was an educated man—say our drawing-room democrats
sentimentally. Yes, we have admitted this, and we willingly admit that he was
better educated and cleverer (which does not always go together with
education) than the democrats themselves, for he better understood the
interests of his own class and his own counter-revolutionary
social movement than you, gentlemen of Tovarishch , understand the interests of the movement for emancipation. The educated
counter-revolutionary landlord knew how to defend the interests of his class
subtly and artfully; he skilfully covered up the selfish strivings and
rapacious appetites of the semi-feudal landlords with a veil of noble words and
outward gentlemanliness; he insisted (to Stolypin) on the protection of these
interests by the most civilised forms of class domination. Heyden and his like
brought all their “education” to the altar of the interests of the
landlords . To a real democrat, and not a “respectable” boor
from the Russian radical salons, this might have served as an excellent subject
for a journalist who wanted to show the prostitution of education in
modern society.

When the “democrat” prates about education, he wants to create in
the reader’s mind an impression of superior knowledge, a broad outlook,
and an ennobled mind and heart. For the Heydens education is a thin veneer,
training, a “coaching” in gentlemanly ways of performing the
meanest and dirtiest political deals. For all Heyden’s Octobrism,
all his “peaceful renovationism”, [6] all his negotiations with Stolypin
after the dissolution of the First Duma were in fact the carrying-out of the
meanest and dirtiest political business, arranging how most reliably, craftily,
and art fully, how most solidly within and least noticeably without to defend
the rights of the aristocratic Russian nobility to the blood and
sweat of the millions of “muzhiks”,. who have always and incessantly
been robbed by these Heydens, before 1861, during 1861, after 1861, and after
1905.

In their time Nekrasov and Saltykov taught Russian society to see through the
outward gloss and varnish of the feudal landlord’s education the predatory
interests that lay beneath it; they taught it to hate the hypocrisy and
callousness of such types. Yet the modern Russian intellectual, who imagines
himself to be the guardian of the democratic heritage, and who belongs to the
Cadet

Party [1] or to the Cadet yes-men, teaches the people grovelling servility
and delights in his impartiality as a non-party democrat.

A spectacle almost more revolting than that offered by the feats of
Dubasov and Stolypin....

“ Heyden was a

‘man’"—exclaims the drawing-room democrat with enthusiasm. “Heyden was humane.”

This sentimentalising over Heyden’s humaneness reminds us not only of
Nekrasov and Saltykov, but also of Turgenev in his A Hunter’s Sketches . Here we find depicted a civilised educated landlord, a cultured
man with a European polish well versed in the social graces. The landlord is
treating his guest with wine and conversing on lofty themes. “Why
hasn’t the wine been warmed?”—he asks the lackey. The lackey turns
pale and does not answer. The landlord rings, and when the servant enters, he
says, without raising his voice, “About Fyodor... make the necessary
arrangements.”

Here you have an example of Heyden-like “humaneness”, or humaneness
à la Heyden. Turgenev’s landlord [7] is “humane” too, ... so humane, compared with

Saltychikha, [8] for instance, that he does not go to the stables in
person to see that it has been arranged for Fyodor to be flogged. He is so
humane that he does not see to it that the birch with which Fyodor is to be
flogged has been soaked in salt water. He would never think of hitting or
scolding .a lackey, would this landlord; he only “arranges
things” from a distance, like the educated man he is, in a gentle and
humane manner, without noise, without fuss, without making a “public
scene” ....

Heyden’s humaneness was of exactly the same kind. He himself did not join
the Luzhenovskys and Filonovs in flogging and maltreating the peasants. He did
not join the Rennenkampfs and Meller-Zakomelskys in their punitive expeditions. [9] He did not join Dubasov in his Moscow shootings. So
humane was he that he refrained from such actions, leaving all the
“arrangements” to these heroes of the national “stable”
and controlling from his peaceful and cultured study the political party which
supported the government of the Dubasovs and whose leaders drank the health of
the conqueror of Moscow, Dubasov.... Was it not indeed humane to send the
Dubasovs “to arrange about Fyodor” instead of going to the stables
himself? To the old women who run the political department of our liberal
and

democratic press, this is a model of humaneness. “He had a heart of gold,
he wouldn’t hurt a fly!” “A rare and happy lot”—to support the Dubasovs, to enjoy the fruits of the vengeance wreaked by the
Dubasovs, and not to be held responsible for the Dubasovs.

The drawing-room democrat considers it the height of democracy to sigh over the
fact that we are not being governed by the Heydens (for it never enters the
head of this drawing-room simpleton that there is a “natural”
division of labour between the Heydens and the Dubasovs). Listen to this:

“... and how sad that he

[Heyden] [2] has died now, when he would have been most useful. He would now have
fought the extreme Right, revealing the finest aspects of his soul and
defending constitutional principles with all the energy and fertility of
mind natural to him.” ( Tovarishch , No. 299, Friday, June
22, “In Memory of Count Heyden”, a letter from Pskov
Gubernia.)

How sad that the educated and humane Heyden, the peaceful renovator, is not
here to cloak with his constitutional phrase-mongering the nakedness of the
Third, Octobrist Duma, the nakedness of the autocracy which is destroying the
Duma! It is the aim of the “democratic” journalist not to tear off
the false cloak, not to show up to the people their oppressor enemies in all
their nakedness, but to regret the absence of the experienced hypocrites who
adorn the ranks of the Octobrists....

Was ist der Philister? Em hohler Darm, voll Furcht und Hoffnung, dass Gott erbarm ! What is a philistine? A hollow gut, full of fear and hope
that God will have mercy! [10] What is the Russian liberal-democratic philistine of the Cadet and near-Cadet camp? A hollow gut,
full of fear and hope that the counter-revolutionary landlord will have mercy!

June 1907

---
Notes:
[1]
The Cadets have shown themselves a hundred times more servile in their
appreciation of Heyden than the gentlemen of Tovarishch . We took
the latter as a specimen of the “democracy” of the “decent people” of
Russian “society”. — Lenin

[2]
Interpolations in square hrackets (within passages quoted by Lenin)
have been introduced by Lenin, unless otherwise indicated.—
Ed .

[3]
The article “ In Memory of Count Heyden ” was published in the Bolshevik symposium Voice of Life
(St. Petersburg, 1907) with the following editorial note: “Written in
June, immediately after the appearance of Tovarishch’s panegyric, this article, owing to circumstances ‘beyond the control’ of the
author, was not published at the time. In now including it in this volume,
the editors believe, that it has lost none of its significance today,
although the occasion that prompted it is now a matter of the past.”

Circumstances “beyond the control” of the author was a term
usually applied to obstacles on the part of the police and the
censorship. In this case it was to be understood, in addition, that the
Bolshevik symposium was the only publication in which Lenin’s article
could be published at that time. The article was unsigned, but in the table
of contents the author’s initials “N. L.” were given.

[4]
Russkiye Vedomosti ( Russian Recorder) —a daily newspaper published in Moscow since 1863 by liberal professors of Moscow
University and Zemstvo personalities; it expressed the views of the liberal
landlords and bourgeoisie. In 1905, it became the organ of the Right
Cadets. After the October Revolution (1917) it was closed down.

[5]
This refers to the All-Russian political strike in October 1905, when
the revolutionary crisis was coming to a head.

[6]
Peaceful renovationism —the “Party of Peaceful
Renovation” was a counter-revolutionary organisation of the landlords
and bourgeoisie. It was formed in 1906, uniting the Left Octobrists and
Right Cadets. Lenin called the “Party of Peaceful Renovation”
the “Party of Peaceful Plunder”.

[7]
This refers to the landlord Penochkin in Turgenev’s story The Village Elder .

[8]
Saltychikha (Darya Ivanovna Saltykova, 1730-1801)—a landowner, famous for her brutal treatment of her serfs.

[9]
Rennenkampf and Meller-Zakomelsky —tsarist generals, known for their harsh suppression of the revolutionary
movement.

[10]

" Lenin quotes Goethe’s definition of a philistine (Goethe,
Werke . Neue Ausgabe. Zweiter Band, Berlin, 1893, S. 593).