V. I.

Lenin

According to reports in the press, the congresses of small landowners
and deans of churches in 48 gubernias of European Russia have elected 7,990
delegates, including 8,516 priests. The latter make up 82 per cent.

The complete returns for the fifty gubernias cannot much alter this
result.

Let us, therefore, see what these elections signify.

The law provides that the small landowners and the parishes shall elect
one delegate per electoral category established for participation
in the landowners’ congress. This means that the number of delegates must
be proportional to the amount of land owned by the electorate.

Statistics for 1905 give the following data for the fifty gubernias of
European Russia:

| Church estates . . . | 1,900,000dessiatines |
| --- | --- |
| Lands privately owned by priests | 300,000 ” |
| Total owned by the priesthood | 2,200,000 ” |
| Lands privately owned by towns- people . . . | 3,700,000 ” |
| Lands privately owned by peas- ants . . . | 13,200,000 ” |
| Lands privately by other categories . . . | 2,200,000 ” |
| Total of small holdings owned by “laymen” . . . | 19,100,000 ” |

These data probably take account of small holdings to a lesser extent
than of the lands owned by the priesthood, Nevertheless, it follows that
the small private holdings total 21,300,000 dessiatines, of which priests own 2,200,000 dessiatines,
or a little over one-tenth. Yet the priesthood has elected upwards
of eight-tenths of the total number of delegates!!

How could that come about? It was simple enough. The fact is that small
landowners seldom go to elections—they lack the means and take little
interest in the matter; be sides, the police put a thousand obstacles in
the way of free elections. The priests, however, have all been “induced”
to attend.

The priests will vote for the candidates who suit the government. This
explains why even the landlords are murmuring, to say nothing of
the bourgeoisie. The Octobrists and the nationalists are murmuring
too. They all accuse the government of “ engineering ” the
elections. But the landlords and the big bourgeoisie themselves
would like to engineer the elections .

Thus there is a clash between absolutism, on the one hand, and the
landlords and the bourgeois bigwigs, on the other. The government wanted to
secure the backing of the landlords and the top strata of the bourgeoisie;
as is known, this idea underlies the whole law of June 3, 1907.

As it happens, however, the government cannot get along even
with the Octobrists. It has not succeeded in organising
even a feudal-bourgeois monarchy of a kind “satisfactory” to
these classes.

Unquestionably, this failure has in fact been acknowledged by the
government, which has set about organising its own officials in
the shape of the subordinate, dependent priesthood!

In the science of history, this device of a government which retains
the essential features of absolutism is called Bonapartism. In this case,
it is not definite classes that serve as a support, or not they alone, and
not chiefly, but hand-picked elements, mostly from among various dependent
sections of the population.

How is the possibility of this phenomenon to be explained in
“sociological” terms, i.e., from the standpoint of the class struggle?

It is due to a balance between the forces of the hostile or rival
classes. If, for example, the Purishkeviches are competing with the Guchkovs and Ryabushinskys, the government
may—provided there is a certain balance between the forces of these
rivals—gain greater independence (within certain, rather narrow
limits, of course) than when either of these classes has a decisive
superiority. If, on the other hand, this government is historically linked
by continuity and so on with especially “vivid” forms of absolutism, and
if militarist and bureaucratic traditions in the sense of non-electivity of
judges and officials are strong in the country, then the limits of that
independence will be still greater, its manifestations still more open, the
methods used in “picking” voters, and electors voting on orders from
above, still more crude, and tyranny still more tangible.

It is something like this that contemporary Russia is passing
through. The “step towards transformation into a bourgeois monarchy” [1] is made more difficult by the borrowing of Bonapartist methods. Whereas in
France the bourgeois monarchy and the Bonapartist empire differed clearly
and sharply from each other, in Germany Bismarck gave models of a
“combination” of the two types, with those features which Marx called
“military despotism” [2] —to say nothing of Bonapartism—obviously
predominating.

It is said that the carp likes to be fried in sour cream. We don’t know
whether the philistine likes to be “fried” in a bourgeois monarchy, in
old feudal absolutism, in the “latest” type of Bonapartism or in military
despotism, or, lastly, in a certain blend of all these “methods”. But
while the distinction may seem very small from the point of view of the
philistine and so-called “legal order”, i.e., from a purely
juridical, formally constitutional point of view, it is substantial from
the point of view of the class struggle.

It won’t make things easier for the philistine to know that he is being
beaten not only in the old way but in the new as well. But the
stability of a regime pressing down the philistine, the
conditions of development and disintegration of this regime, and
its capacity to suffer a rapid fiasco all depend to a large degree on whether we are confronted with more or less
evident, open, solid and direct forms of rule of definite classes, or with
various indirect, unstable forms of their rule.

The rule of classes is harder to eliminate than the unstable
forms of the superstructure steeped in the shabby spirit of old times and
supported by a picked “electorate”.

The experiment of Sabler and Makarov in “organising” the priesthood
for the Fourth Duma elections should be of considerable interest to
everyone, both “sociologically” and in terms of practical politics.

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Notes:
[1]
See present edition, Vol. 15, p. 347.— Ed .

[2]
See Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (Marx and
Engels, Selected Works , Moscow, 1958, Vol. II, p. 33).