V. I.

Lenin

The above is the subtitle of an article on the death of
Karaulov, which Mr. Rubanovich, representative of the
Socialist-Revolutionary

Party, [2] published in the French socialist newspaper

L’Humanité . [3] It is, indeed, an instructive career.

After the events of March 1, 1881, Karaulov arrived in Paris and
offered his services to the head of the Narodnaya

Volya [4] to put the organisation on its feet again. The editor of the
Vestnik Narodnoi Voli , [5] the future renegade Tikhomirov, gave him
permission. Karaulov returned to Russia with Lopatin, Sukhomlin, and
others. In 1884 he was arrested in Kiev and sentenced to four years’ penal
servitude, although his colleagues received death sentences or penal
servitude for life.

How is this “strange [in the words of Mr. Rubanovich] clemency” to be
explained? Rumour had it, Mr. Rubanovich informs us, that the President of
the military court was amazed by the resemblance Karaulov bore to his son,
who had died in tragic circumstances. But, Mr. Rubanovich adds, “other
explanations of this strange clemency” are current. However, he does not
tell us what they are. [1]

But there are no doubts as to Karaulov’s most recent “career”. In
1905 he came out so brazenly against the revolutionaries, that the voters
repudiated him in the elections to the First and the Second State
Dumas. “If I have to choose between two camps,” Karaulov said at a
meeting (according to a report in Birzheviye Vedomosti [6] ), “one of which is made up of government troops, and the other of revolutionaries with the
notorious slogan of dictatorship of the proletariat, I should not hesitate
to join the former against the latter.” No wonder Witte interceded on
behalf of this man for the reinstatement of his rights. No wonder that
Karaulov gained prominence in the Third Duma as one of the most despicable
counter-revolutionary Cadets, one of those who always had some hypocritical
phrase ready.

The surprising thing is that there are people who consider themselves
sympathisers of democracy, and who today, on the occasion of Karaulov’s
death, extol him as a “democrat”, a “fighter”, etc.

The surprising thing is that Mr. Rubanovich, who re presents the
Socialist-Revolutionary Party, can write in a French socialist organ that
“much will be forgiven this former Socialist-Revolutionary who went over
to the camp of the moderates, because he could strike the proper chord”
(the reference is to the sitting of the Duma at which the Rights called
Karaulov a jail-bird, and he retorted that he was proud of the fact).

To “forgive” a renegade his career because of an effective
phrase is fully in the spirit of the
Socialist-Revolutionaries. There are renegades from all revolutionary
parties in all countries, and there are always some among them who are past
masters in the art of playing for effect. But it is not often that
revolutionaries, representatives of “revolutionary” parties, openly
declare: “Much will be forgiven” a renegade for clever repartee. For such
things to happen, it is necessary that the “revolutionary” party should
include an enormous proportion of liberals with bombs . For such
things to happen, it is necessary that these liberals, now left with out
bombs, should feel at home in “revolutionary” parties that do not in any
way concern themselves with upholding revolutionary principles,
revolutionary tradition, revolutionary honour and duty.

There is yet another and more profound lesson to be drawn from “the
career of a Russian terrorist”. It is a lesson of the class struggle; it
shows that in Russia at present only revolutionary classes can
serve as a prop for parties which are to any real extent revolutionary. Not
Karaulov alone, but the mass of the bourgeois intelligentsia,
which until recently was democratic and even revolutionary-minded, has now turned its back on democracy and the revolution. There is nothing accidental
in this; it is the inevitable result of the development of
class-consciousness on the part of the Russian bourgeoisie which has
realised through experience how close is the moment when the
“camp” of the monarchy and the camp of the revolution will confront each
other and has realised through experience which side it will have
to choose when that moment comes.

Those who want to learn from the great lessons of the Russian
revolution must realise that only the development of the
class-consciousness of the proletariat, only the organisation of
this class and the exclusion of petty-bourgeois “fellow-travellers” from its party, and the elimination of the
vacillation, weakness, and lack of principle, characteristic of them,
can again lead, and surely will lead, to new victories of the
people over the monarchy of the Romanovs.

---
Notes:
[1]
He apparently refers to the current suspicion that Karaulov “made a
clean breast of it” at the investigation. — Lenin

[2]
Socialist-Revolutionary Party —a petty-bourgeois party in
Russia, which arose at the end of 1901 and beginning of 1902 as a result of
the union of various Narodnik groups and circles. The newspaper
Revolutsionnaya Rossiya ( Revolutionary Russia ) (1900–05)
and the magazine Vestnik Russkoi Revolutsii ( Herald of the Russian Revolution ) (1901–05) became its official organs. The
Socialist-Revolutionaries did not recognise the class differences between
the proletariat and petty proprietors, glossed over the class
differentiation and contradictions within the peasantry and rejected the leading role of
the proletariat, in the revolution. The views of the
Socialist-Revolutionaries were an eclectic mixture of the ideas of Narodism
and revisionism, and they tried, as Lenin expressed it, to patch up “the
rents in the Narodnik ideas with bits of fashionable opportunist
‘criticism’ of Marxism” (see present edition, Vol. 9, p. 310). The tactics
of individual terrorism advocated by the Socialist-Revolutionaries as the
main form of struggle against the autocracy, did great harm to the
revolutionary movement and hampered the organisation of the masses for
revolutionary struggle.

The agrarian programme of the Socialist-Revolutionaries envisaged the
abolition of private ownership of the land and its transfer to the village
communes on the basis of the “labour principle” and equalitarian land
tenure (i.e., as much land to be given to each peasant household as it
could farm without employing hired labour), and also the development of
co-operatives. This programme, which the Socialist-Revolutionaries called
the “socialisation of the land”, in reality bore no resemblance
whatsoever to socialism. In analysing the programme of the
Socialist-Revolutionaries, Lenin showed that the preservation of commodity
production and private farming on commonly-owned land does not eliminate
the domination of capital, does not relieve the working peasants of
exploitation and ruin. Co-operatives cannot be the means of salvation for
the small peasants under capitalist conditions since they serve to enrich
the village bourgeoisie. At the same time, Lenin pointed out that the
demand for equalitarian land tenure, although not socialist, was of an
historically progressive revolutionary-democratic character, inasmuch as it
was directed against reactionary landed proprietorship.

The Bolshevik Party exposed the attempts of the
Socialist-Revolutionaries to masquerade as socialists, carried out a deter
mined struggle against the Socialist-Revolutionaries for influence over the
peasantry, and showed the danger to the working-class movement of their
tactics of individual terrorism. At the same time the Bolsheviks were
prepared, on definite conditions, to enter into temporary agreements with
the Socialist-Revolutionaries in the struggle against tsarism.

The fact that the peasantry is not a homogeneous class deter mined the
political and ideological instability and organisational disunity of the
Socialist-Revolutionaries and their constant waverings between the liberal
bourgeoisie and the proletariat. As early as the first Russian revolution
the Right wing of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party broke away and formed
the legal Popular Socialist Party, whose outlook was close to that of the
Cadets, and the Left wing formed the semi-anarchist league of
Maximalists. During the Stolypin reaction the Socialist-Revolutionary Party
experienced a complete ideological and organisational break down. The
majority of its members adopted a social-chauvinist position during the
First World War.

After the victory of the February bourgeois-democratic revolution in
1917, the Socialist-Revolutionaries together with the Mensheviks and Cadets were the mainstay of the counter-revolutionary
bourgeois-landlord Provisional Government of which the Party leaders
(Kerensky, Avksentyev, Chernov) were members. The Socialist-Revolutionaries
refused to support the demands of the peas ants for the abolition of
landlordism, supporting its preservation, and the Socialist-Revolutionary
ministers of the Provisional Government sent punitive detachments against
those peasants who had seized the landlords’ estates.

At the end of November 1917, Left-wing Socialist-Revolutionaries
founded the independent party of Left Socialist-Revolutionaries. Striving
to preserve their influence over the peasant masses, the Left
Socialist-Revolutionaries formally recognised Soviet power and entered into
an agreement with the Bolsheviks, but very soon began to struggle against
Soviet power.

During the years of foreign military intervention and civil war, the
Socialist-Revolutionaries engaged in counter-revolutionary subversive
activities, actively supported the interventionists and the whiteguard
elements, took part in counter-revolutionary plots, organised terrorist
acts against leaders of the Soviet state and the Communist Party. After the
civil war, the Socialist-Revolutionaries continued their hostile activities
against the Soviet state both within the country and abroad among
whiteguard émigrés.

[3]
L’Humanité —a daily newspaper founded in 1904 by Jean
Jaurès as the organ of the French Socialist Party. Soon after the
split in the Socialist Party at the Tours Congress (December 1920) and the
formation of the Communist Party, the paper became the latter’s organ. It
is now published in Paris as the central organ of the French Communist
Party.

[4]
Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will)—the secret political organisation of Narodnik-terrorists, formed in August 1879 following the
split in the Narodnik organisation Zemlya i Volya ( Land and Freedom ). Narodnaya Volya was headed by an Executive
Committee which included A. I. Zhelyabov, A. A. Kvyatkovsky,
A. D. Mikhailov, N. A. Morozov, Sophia Perovskaya, Vera Figner,
M. F. Frolenko, and others. While still adhering to Narodnik
utopian-socialist ideas, Narodnaya Volya took up the political struggle,
regarding the overthrow of the autocracy and the achievement of political
freedom as a major aim. Its programme envisaged a “permanent popular
representative body” elected by universal suffrage, the proclamation of
democratic liberties, the transfer of the land to the people, and measures
to put the factories in the hands of the workers. “The Narodnaya Volya
members,” wrote Lenin, “made a step forward when they took up the
political struggle, but they failed to connect it with socialism”

Narodnaya Volya fought heroically against the tsarist autocracy; guided
by their erroneous theory of “active” heroes and a “passive” mass, they
planned to remould society without the participation of the people, by their own efforts, through individual terrorism that would
intimidate and disorganise the government. After the assassination of
Alexander II on March 1, 1881, the government was able, by savage
reprisals, death sentences, anti acts of provocation, to crush it out of
existence. Repeated attempts to revive the organisation during the eighties
ended in failure. Thus, in 1886 a group in the Narodnaya Volya tradition
was formed by A. I. Ulyanov (elder brother of Lenin) and P. Y. Shevyryov;
but after an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Alexander III in 1887, the
group was uncovered and its active members executed.

While criticising Narodnaya Volya’s erroneous utopian programme, Lenin
expressed great respect for its members’ selfless struggle against tsarism
and valued highly the technique of its underground activities and strictly
centralised organisation.

[5]
Vestnik Narodnoi Voli ( Messenger of the People’s Will ) was published in Geneva from 1883 to 1886, as the organ of the
Narodnaya Volya Party. It was edited by P. L. Lavrov and L. A. Tikhomirov;
in all there were five issues.

[6]
Birzheviye Vedomosti or Birzhevka ( Stock-Exchange Recorder )—a daily bourgeois newspaper published in St. Petersburg
from 1880. The name Birzhevka was commonly used to indicate the
lack of principle and corruption of the bourgeois press. The newspaper was
closed down at the end of October 1917.