V. I.

Lenin

February 19, 1911, marks the fiftieth anniversary of the
fall of serfdom in Russia. Everywhere preparations are under way to
celebrate this jubilee. The tsarist government is taking every precaution
to ensure that only the most reactionary views regarding the so-called
“emancipation” of the peasants are put forward in the churches and
schools, in the barracks and at public lectures. Circular letters are being
rushed from St. Petersburg to all parts of Russia, instructing all and
sundry institutions not to order for distribution among the people any
books and pamphlets other than those published by the National Club, i.e.,
by one of the most reactionary parties in the Third Duma. In some places
overzealous governors have even gone so far as to dissolve committees
organised without police “guidance” (for instance, by the

Zemstvos [2] ) for the celebration of the anniversary of the Peasant
“Reform”; they are being dissolved for showing insufficient willingness
to conduct the celebrations along the lines demanded by the Black-Hundred
government.

The government is worried. It sees that no matter how downtrodden,
intimidated, backward and ignorant a worker or a peasant may be, the mere
mention of the fact that fifty years ago the abolition of serfdom was
proclaimed nevertheless stirs and agitates people repressed by the Duma of
the landlords, of the nobility, people who are suffering more than ever
before from the petty tyrannies, violence and oppression of the
feudal-minded landowners and of their police and bureaucrats.

In Western Europe the last survivals of serfdom were abolished by the
Revolution of 1789 in France and by the revolutions of 1848 in most of the other countries. In Russia, in 1861, the
people, who had for centuries been kept in slavery by the landowners, were
unable to launch a wide spread, open and conscious struggle for
freedom. The peas ant revolts of those days remained isolated, scattered,
spontaneous “riots”, which were easily suppressed. The abolition of
serfdom was effected, not by an insurrectionary people, but by the
government, which realised after its defeat in the Crimean

War [3] that it was no longer possible to maintain the system of serfdom.

It was the landowners themselves, the landowning government of the
autocratic tsar and his officials, that “emancipated” the peasants in
Russia. And these “emancipators” manipulated matters in such a way that the peasants entered “freedom” stripped to the point of
pauperism; they were released from, slavery to the landowners to fall into
bondage to the very same landowners and their flunkeys.

The noble landowners “emancipated” the Russian peas ants in such a
way that more than a fifth of all the peasant land was cut off and
taken away by the landlords. The peas ants were compelled to pay
redemption money , i.e., tribute to the former slaveholders, for their own peasant land drenched with their sweat and
blood. The peasants paid hundreds of millions of rubles in such tribute to
the feudal lords, thus lapsing into ever greater poverty. Not content with
grabbing peasant land and leaving to the peasants the worst and sometimes
entirely worthless land, the landowners frequently laid traps for
them—they divided up the land in such a way as to leave the peasants
either without pastures, or without meadows, forests, or water for their
animals. In most of the gubernias [1] of Russia proper the peasants, after the abolition of serfdom, remained in
the same old state of hopeless bondage to the landowners. After their
“emancipation” the peasants still remained the “lower” social-estate,
tax-paying cattle, the common herd over whom the authorities set up by the landowners lorded it at will, from whom they
exacted taxes, whom they flogged with birches, manhandled, and humiliated.

In no other country in the world has the peasantry, after its
“emancipation”, experienced such ruination, such poverty, such
humiliations and such outrageous treatment as in Russia.

But the fall of serfdom stirred up the whole people, awakened it from
age-long slumber, taught it to seek its own way out, to wage its own fight
for complete freedom.

The fall of serfdom in Russia was followed by an increasingly rapid
development of cities, and factories, mills and railways were
built. Capitalist Russia was advancing to replace feudal Russia. The
settled, downtrodden serf peas ant who stuck firmly to his village, had
implicit faith in the priests and stood in awe of the “authorities” was
gradually giving way to a new generation of peasants, peasants who had
worked as seasonal labourers in the cities and had learned something from
their bitter experience of a life of wandering and wage-labour. The number
of workers in the big towns, in the factories, was constantly on the
increase. Gradually the workers began to form associations for their common
struggle against the capitalists and the government. By waging this
struggle the Russian working class helped the peasant millions to rise,
straighten their backs and cast off serf habits.

In 1861 the peasants were only capable of “riots”. In the decades
that followed the Russian revolutionaries who made heroic efforts to rouse
the people to struggle remained isolated figures and perished under the
blows of the autocracy. By 1905 the Russian working class had gained
strength and had matured as a result of the years of strike struggles and
the years of propaganda, agitation and organisation carried on by the
Social-Democratic Party. And the Russian working class led the whole
people, the millions of peasants, into revolution .

The Revolution of 1905 undermined the tsarist autocracy. Out of a mob
of muzhiks repressed by feudal slavery of accursed memory, this revolution
created, for the first time in Russia, a people beginning to understand its
rights, beginning to realise its strength, For the first time, the

Revolution of 1905 showed the tsarist government, the Russian landowners
and the Russian bourgeoisie that mil lions and tens of millions of people
were becoming citizens , were becoming fighters who would
no longer permit anyone to treat them like cattle, treat them as a mob. The
real emancipation of the masses from oppression and tyranny has nowhere in
the world ever been effected by any other means than the independent,
heroic, conscious struggle of the masses themselves.

The Revolution of 1905 only undermined the autocracy; it did not
destroy it. Now the autocracy is venting its rage on the people. The
landowners’ Duma serves only to oppress and repress the people all the
more. Discontent and anger are again rife everywhere. That first step will
be followed by a second. The beginning of the struggle will have its
continuation. The Revolution of 1905 will he followed by a new, a second,
revolution. The anniversary of the fall of serfdom serves as a reminder of,
and a call for, this second revolution.

The liberals whine: we need “another February 19”. That is not
true. This kind of talk is worthy only of bourgeois cowards. No second
“February 19” is possible after 1905. There can be no “emancipation from
above” of a people which has learned (and is learning—from the
experience of the landowners’ Third Duma) to fight from below. There can be
no “emancipation from above” of a people which has been led, even if but
once, by the revolutionary proletariat.

The Black Hundreds understand this, and that is why they are afraid of
the anniversary of 1861. As Menshikov, that faithful watchdog of the tsar’s
Black Hundreds, wrote in Novoye Vremya : “The year 1861 failed to prevent 1905 ”.

The Black-Hundred Duma and the fury with which the tsarist government
is persecuting its enemies is not preventing but hastening the new
revolution. The grim experience of 1908–10 has taught the people to take
up the fight again. The workers’ summer strikes (in 1910) have been
followed by the students’ winter strikes. The new struggle is gaining
momentum perhaps more slowly than we would wish, but surely and inevitably.

The revolutionary Social-Democratic movement, while purging itself of
the sceptics who have turned their backs on the revolution and the illegal
party of the working class, is mustering its ranks and welding its forces
for the impending great battles.

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Notes:
[1]
Gubernia , uyezd , volost —Russian administrative-territorial units. The largest of these was the gubernia,
which had its subdivisions in uyezds, which in turn were subdivided into
volosts. This system of districting continued under the Soviet power until
the introduction of the new system of administrative-territorial division
of the country in 1929–30.— Ed .

[2]
Zemstvos —local government bodies introduced in the central
gubernias of tsarist Russia in 1864. Nobility played the leading part in
them. Their functions were limited to purely local economic problems
(hospitals and road-building, statistics, insurance, etc.). Their
activities were controlled by the gubernia governors and the Minister of
the Interior, who could overrule any of their decisions disapproved by the
government.

[3]
The war between Russia and the coalition of England, France, Turkey,
and Sardinia in 1853–56.