V. I.

Lenin

In October 1905, Russia was at the peak of the revolutionary upsurge. The proletariat swept away the Bulygin Duma and drew
the mass of the people into an open struggle against the autocracy. In
October 1907, we are apparently at the lowest ebb of the open mass
struggle. But the period of decline that set in after the defeat of
December 1905 brought with it not only a flowering of constitutional
illusions, but a complete shattering of these illusions. After the
dissolution of the two Dumas and the coup d’état of June 3, the
Third Duma, which is to be convened, clearly puts an end to the period of
belief in peaceful cohabitation between the autocracy and popular
representation and ushers in a new epoch in the development of the
revolution.

At a moment like the present, a comparison between the revolution and
counter-revolution in Russia, between the period of revolutionary onslaught
(1905) and that of counter-revolutionary playing with a constitution (1906
and 1907) suggests itself as a matter of course. Such a comparison is
implicit in any attempt to define a political line for the immediate
future. Contrasting “errors of the revolution” or “revolutionary illusions” with “positive constitutional
work” is the keynote of present-day political literature. The Cadets
shout about it at their pre-election meetings. The liberal press chants,
howls, and rants about it. We have here Mr. Struve, vehemently and
spitefully venting his annoyance on the revolutionaries because hopes of a
“compromise” have totally collapsed. We have here Milyukov,
who, for all his mincing manners and Jesuitism, has been forced by events
to arrive at the clear,accurate and—above all—truthful statement: “the enemies are on the left”. We have here
publicists in the vein of Tovarishch , such as Kuskova, Smirnov,
Plekhanov, Gorn, Yordansky, Cherevanin, and others who denounce the
October-December struggle as folly, and more or less openly advocate a “democratic” coalition with the Cadets. The real Cadet
elements in this turbid stream express the counter-revolutionary interests of
the bourgeoisie and the boundless servility of intellectualist philistinism. As
for the elements which have not yet sunk quite to the level of Struve, their
dominant feature is failure to understand the connection
between revolution and counter-revolution in Russia, an inability to see
everything we have experienced as an integral social movement developing in
accordance with its own inner logic.

The period of revolutionary onslaught demonstrated in action the class
composition of Russia’s population and the attitude of the different
classes towards the old autocracy. Events have now taught everyone, even people
who are utter strangers to Marxism, to reckon the chronology of the revolution
from January 9, 1905, that is, from the first consciously political
movement of the masses belonging to a single definite class . When the Social-Democrats, from an analysis of Russia’s
economic realities, deduced the leading role, the hegemony of the proletariat in
our revolution, this seemed to be a bookish infatuation of theoreticians. The
revolution confirmed our theory, because it is the only truly revolutionary
theory. The proletariat actually took the lead in the revolution all the
time. The Social-Democrats actually proved to be the ideological vanguard of the
proletariat. The struggle of the masses developed under the leadership of the
proletariat with remarkable speed, much faster than many revolutionaries had
expected. In the course of a single year it rose to the most decisive forms of
revolutionary onslaught that history has ever known—to mass strikes and
armed uprisings. The organisation of the proletarian masses went forward with
astonishing speed in the course of the struggle itself. Other sections of the
population, comprising the fighting ranks of the revolutionary people, followed
the proletariat’s lead and began to organise. The semi-proletarian mass of
various kinds of non-manual workers began to organise, followed by the peasant
democracy, the professional intelligentsia, and so on. The period of
proletarian victories was a period of growth in mass organisation unprecedented
in Russian history and vast even by European standards.

The proletariat at that time won for itself a number of improvements in
working conditions. The peasant mass won a “reduction” in the
arbitrary power of the landlords and lower prices for the lease and sale of
land. All Russia won a considerable degree of freedom of assembly, speech,
and association, and made the autocracy publicly renounce its old practices
and recognise the constitution.

All that the liberation movement in Russia has won up to now was won entirely
and exclusively by the revolutionary struggle of the masses headed by the
proletariat.

The turning-point in the struggle began with the defeat of the December
uprising. Step by step the counter-revolution passed to the offensive as
the mass struggle weakened. During the period of the First Duma this
struggle was still formidably manifest in the intensification of the
peasant movement, in widespread attacks upon the nests of the semi-feudal
landlords, and in a number of revolts among the soldiers. The reaction
attacked slowly at that time, not daring to carry out a coup d’état
straightaway. Only after the suppression of the Sveaborg and Kronstadt
revolts of July 1906 did it act more boldly, when it introduced the regime
of military tribunals, began piecemeal to deprive the population of their
franchise (the Senate interpretations [1] ), and, finally, surrounded the Second Duma completely
with a police siege and overthrew the whole notorious constitution. All
self-established free organisations of the masses were replaced at that
time by “legal struggle” within the framework of the police
constitution as interpreted by the Dubasovs and Stolypins. The supremacy of
the Social-Democrats gave place to the supremacy of the Cadets, who
predominated in both Dumas. The period of decline in the movement of the
masses was a period of peak development for the Party of the Cadets. It
exploited this decline by coming forward as the “champion” of
the constitution. It upheld faith in this constitution among the people
with all its might and preached the need to keep strictly to
“parliamentary” struggle.

The bankruptcy of the “Cadet constitution” is the bankruptcy of
Cadet tactics and Cadet hegemony in the emancipatory struggle. The selfish
class character of all the talk by our liberals about “revolutionary
illusions” and the “errors of the revolution” becomes patently obvious when we compare
the two periods of the revolution. The proletarian mass struggle won gains
for the whole people. The liberal leadership of the movement produced
nothing but defeats. The revolutionary onslaught of the proletariat
steadily raised the political consciousness of the masses and their
organisation. It set increasingly higher aims before them, stimulated their
independent participation in political life, and taught them how to
fight. The hegemony of the liberals during the period of the two Dumas
lowered the political consciousness of the masses, demoralised their
revolutionary organisation, and dulled their comprehension of democratic
aims.

The liberal, leaders of the First and Second Dumas gave the people a splendid
demonstration of slavish legal “struggle”, as a result of which the
autocratic advocates of serfdom swept away the constitutional paradise of the
liberal wind-bags with a stroke of the pen and ridiculed the subtle diplomacy
of the visitors to ministerial ante-rooms. The liberals have not a single gain
to show throughout the Russian revolution, not a single success, not .a single
attempt, at all democratic, to organise the forces of the people in the struggle
for freedom.

Until October 1905, the liberals sometimes maintained a benevolent neutrality
towards the revolutionary struggle of the masses, but already at that time they
had begun to oppose it, sending a deputation to the tsar with abject speeches
and supporting the Bulygin Duma not out of thoughtlessness, but out of sheer
hostility to the revolution. After October 1905, all that the liberals did was
to shame fully betray the cause of the people’s freedom.

In November 1905, they sent Mr. Struve to have an intimate talk with
Mr. Witte. In the spring of 1900, they undermined the revolutionary
boycott, and by refusing to speak out openly against the loan for Europe to
hear, helped the government to obtain millions of rubles for the conquest
of Russia. In the summer of 1900, they carried on backdoor haggling with

Trepov [2] over ministerial portfolios and fought the “Left”,
i. e., the revolution, in the First Duma. January 1907 saw them running
again to the police authorities (Milyukov’s call on Stolypin). In the
spring

of 1907, they supported the government in the Second Duma. The
revolution exposed the liberals very quickly and showed them in their true
counter-revolutionary colours.

In this respect the period of constitutional hopes served a
very useful purpose as far as the people were concerned. The experience of
the First and Second Dumas has not only made them realise how utterly
contemptible is the role that liberalism plays in our revolution. It has
also, in actual fact, quashed the attempt at leadership of the democratic
movement by a party which only political infants or senile dotards can
regard as being really constitutionally “ democratic ”.

In 1905 and the beginning of 1906, the class composition of the
bourgeois democrats in Russia was not yet clear to everyone. Hopes that the
autocracy could be combined with actual representation of more or less
broad masses of the people existed not only among the ignorant and
downtrodden inhabitants of various out-of-the-way places. Such hopes were
not absent even in ruling spheres of the autocracy. Why did the electoral
law in both the Bulygin and the Witte Dumas grant a considerable degree of
representation to the peasantry? Because belief in the monarchist
sentiments of the countryside still persisted. “The muzhik will help
us out”—this exclamation of an official newspaper in the spring of
1906 expressed the government’s reliance on the conservatism of the
peasant mass. In those days the Cadets were not only not aware of the
antagonism between the democracy of the peasants and bourgeois liberalism,
but even feared the backwardness of the peasants and desired only one
thing—that the Duma should help to convert the conservative or
indifferent peasant into a liberal. In the spring of 1906, Mr. Struve
expressed an ambitious wish when he wrote, “the peasant in the Duma
will be a Cadet”. In the summer of 1907, the same Mr. Struve raised
the banner of struggle against the Trudovik or Left parties, which he
regarded as the main obstacle to an agreement between bourgeois liberalism
and the autocracy. In the course of eighteen months the slogan of a
struggle for the political enlightenment of the peasants was changed by the
liberals to a slogan of struggle against a “too” politically
educated and demanding peasantry!

This change of slogans expresses as plainly as can be the complete bankruptcy of
liberalism in the Russian revolution. The class antagonism between the mass of
the democratic rural population and the semi-feudal landlords proved to be
immeasurably deeper than the cowardly and dull-witted Cadets imagined. That is
why their attempt to take the lead in the struggle for democracy failed so
quickly and irrevocably. That is why their whole “line” aimed at
reconciling the petty-bourgeois democratic mass of the people with the Octobrist
and Black-Hundred landlords was a fiasco. A great, though negative, gain of the
counter-revolutionary period of the two Dumas was this bankruptcy of the
treacherous “champions” of the “people’s freedom”. The class struggle going on below threw these heroes of
ministerial ante-rooms overboard, turned them from claimants to
leadership into ordinary lackeys of Octobrism slightly touched up with
constitutional varnish.

He who still fails to see this bankruptcy of the liberals, who have undergone a
practical test of their worth as champions of democracy, or at least as
fighters in the democratic ranks, has understood absolutely nothing of the
political history of the two Dumas. Among these people the meaningless
reiteration of a memorised formula about supporting bourgeois democracy becomes
counter-revolutionary snivelling. The Social-Democrats should have no regrets at
the shattering of constitutional illusions. They should say what Marx said about
counter-revolution in Germany:

the people gained by the loss of its illusions. [3] Bourgeois democracy in Russia gained by the loss of
worthless leaders and weak-kneed allies. So much the better for the
political development of this democracy.

It remains for the party of the proletariat to see to it that the
valuable political lessons of our revolution and counter-revolution should
be more deeply pondered over and more firmly grasped by the broad
masses. The period of onslaught on the autocracy saw the deployment of the
forces of the proletariat and taught it the fundamentals of revolutionary
tactics; it showed the conditions for the success of the direct struggle of
the masses, which alone was able to achieve improvements of any
importance. The long period during which the proletarian forces were
prepared, trained, and organised preceded those actions of hundreds of thousands of
workers which dealt a mortal blow to the old autocracy in Russia. The
sustained and imperceptible work of guiding all the manifestations of the
proletarian class struggle, the work of building a strong and seasoned
party preceded the outbreak of the truly mass struggle and provided the
conditions necessary for turning that outbreak into a revolution. And now
the proletariat, as the people’s fighting vanguard, must strengthen
its organisation, scrape off all the green mould of intellectualist
opportunism, and gather its forces for a similar sustained and stubborn
effort. The tasks which history and the objective position of the broad
masses have posed before the Russian revolution have not been
solved. Elements of a new, national political crisis have not been
eliminated, but, on the contrary, have grown deeper and wider. The advent
of this crisis will place the proletariat once more at the head of the
movement of the whole people. The workers’ Social-Democratic Party should
be prepared for this role. And the soil, fertilised by the events of 1905
and subsequent years, will yield a harvest tenfold richer. If a party of
several thousand class-conscious advanced members of the working class
could rally a million proletarians behind it at the end of 1905, then
today, when our Party has tens of thousands of Social-Democrats tried and
tested in the revolution, who have become still more closely linked with
the mass of the workers during the struggle itself, it will rally tens of
mil lions behind it and crush the enemy.

Both the socialist and the democratic tasks of the working-class movement in
Russia have been focused much more sharply and brought to the fore more urgently
under the impact of revolutionary events. The struggle against the bourgeoisie
is rising to a higher stage. The capitalists are uniting in national
associations, are leaguing themselves more closely with the government, and are
resorting more often to extreme methods of economic struggle, including mass
lock-outs, in order to “curb” the proletariat. But only moribund
classes are afraid of persecutions. The more rapidly the capitalists achieve
successes the more rapidly does the proletariat grow in numbers and unity. The
economic development of both Russia and the whole world is a guarantee of the proletariat’s invincibility. The bourgeoisie first began
to take shape as a class, as a united and conscious political force during our
revolution. All the more effectively will the workers organise into a united
class all over Russia. And the wider the gulf between the world of capital and
the world of labour, the clearer will be the socialist consciousness of the
workers. Socialist agitation among the proletariat, enriched by the experience
of the revolution, will become more definite. The political organisation of
the bourgeoisie is the best stimulus to the definitive shaping of a socialist
workers’ party.

The aims of this party in the struggle for democracy can henceforth be
considered controversial only among the sympathising” intellectuals, who
are making ready to go over to the liberals. For the mass of the workers these
aims have been made tangibly clear in the fire of revolution. The proletariat
knows from experience that the peasant masses are the basis and the only basis
of bourgeois democracy as a historical force in Russia. On a national scale the
proletariat has already acted as leader of this mass in the struggle against the
semi-feudal landlords and the autocracy and no power can now deflect the
workers’ party from its right path. The role of the liberal Party of the Cadets,
who, under the flag of democracy, guided the peasantry under the wing of
Octobrism, is now played out, and the Social-Democrats, in spite of individual
whiners, will continue their work of explaining this bankruptcy of the liberals
to the masses, explaining that bourgeois democrats cannot do what they want to
do unless they disentangle themselves once for all from their alliance with the
lackeys of Octobrism.

No one at this stage can tell what forms bourgeois democracy in Russia will
assume in the future. Possibly, the bankruptcy of the Cadets may lead to the
formation of a peasant democratic party, a truly mass party, and not an
organisation of terrorists such as the Socialist-Revolutionaries have been and
still are. It is also possible that the objective difficulties of achieving
political unity among the petty bourgeoisie will prevent such a party from being
formed and, for a long time to come, will keep the peasant democracy in its
present state as a loose, amorphous, jelly like Trudovik mass. In either case
our line is one: to hammer.

out the democratic forces by merciless criticism of all vacillations, by
uncompromising struggle against the democrats joining the liberals, who
have proved their counter revolutionariness.

The farther reaction goes, the more violent does the Black-Hundred landlord
become; the more control he gets over the autocracy, the slower will be
Russia’s economic progress and her emancipation from the survivals of
serfdom. And that means, all the stronger and wider will class-conscious and
militant democracy develop among the masses of the urban and rural petty
bourgeoisie. All the stronger will be the mass resistance to the famines,
tyrannies, and outrages to which the peasantry is doomed by the
Octobrists. The Social-Democrats will see to it that, when the democratic
struggle inevitably breaks out with new force, the band of liberal careerists
called the Cadet Party does not once again divide the democratic ranks and
spread discord among them. Either with the people or against the people, that
is the alternative that the Social-Democrats have long put to all claimants to
the role of “democratic” leaders in the revolution. Up to now not
all Social-Democrats have been able to pursue this line consistently; some of
them even believed the liberals’ promises, others closed their eyes to the
liberals’ flirting with the counter-revolution. Now we already have the
educational experience of the first two Dumas.

The revolution has taught the proletariat to wage a mass struggle. The
revolution has shown that the proletariat is able to lead the peasant masses in
the struggle for democracy. The revolution has united the purely proletarian
party still more closely by casting out petty-bourgeois elements from it. The
counter-revolution has taught the petty-bourgeois democrats to give up seeking
for leaders and allies among the liberals, who are mortally afraid of the mass
struggle. On the basis of these lessons of history we can boldly say to the
government of the Black-Hundred landlords: continue along the same line,
Mr. Stolypin and Co.! We shall reap the fruits of what you are sowing!