V. I. Lenin

Source: ru:PSS/v21; en:CW/CW41;es:MT
Translated: machine translation (DeepSeek) from the Russian; AI-translated.

THE POLITICAL SITUATION

1. Crop failure—and famine. The “food” campaign—the Lidvaliad.[1]

2. The Stolypin “agrarian reform”: bourgeois wine is being poured into feudalist bottles. They are bursting.

3. December 1908 on the Stolypin reform[2] and the failure of the liquidators and the Vperyodists to understand it.

4. The Quartermaster scandals: they are stealing.

5. Mismanagement and disorders.

—The Cadet and Octobrist press. The St. Petersburg-Moscow air service, the transport of motor lorries, railway construction, Russian industry on the foreign market, public education and Kasso’s “broom”—everything, everywhere sighs, groans, regrets.

6. The bourgeoisie is weeping for a bourgeois system. It wants “to wash the skin (the fur) without dipping it in water”.

7. Revolution is the only means. Fear, hatred, lack of faith—not swimming with the stream.

8. “Not swimming with the stream”. For revolution. The working class and revolution. The slogan that sums up the political situation and determines the entire content of Party agitation and propaganda (particularly before the Fourth Duma)—for revolution. (Not “universal suffrage”.)

Etc.

Crop failure

Quartermaster scandals

Persia

Kasso and the rout

The Jews and “nationalisation of trade”

The working class and revolution

1. The “revival” everyone is talking about is a symptom of a new upsurge of revolution.

2. Attitude to the revolution of the past: malice, fear, hatred—cowardice, faint-heartedness, pusillanimity—attitude of the working class (“you’ll have 1905 again”).

3. Tasks of the working class’s activity in the new conditions

(α) > consciousness of the masses (δ)

(β) > development of capitalism (α)

(γ) > hostility of the bourgeoisie (β)

(δ) > unification of the enemies (γ)

4. Character of agitation and propaganda.

No need for an illegal party

“   “   “   to propagandise

revolution (not hegemony)

Etc. etc. [liquidationism].

5. “In the palm of your hand” = the Third Duma. The role (of the Cadets).

[1] The “Lidvaliad”—a term coined by Lenin from the name of the Swedish building contractor Lidval, who was involved in a scandal over the construction of a large apartment house in St. Petersburg. The scandal was widely discussed in the press in 1911-12. The “Lidvaliad” was a typical example of the embezzlement and bribery that flourished in the state institutions of tsarist Russia.

[2] See V. I. Lenin, “The Agrarian Programme of Social-Democracy in the First Russian Revolution, 1905-1907” (present edition, Vol. 13, pp. 217-431).—Ed.