V. I.

Lenin

The magazine Russkoye Bogatstvo shows us the two streams of the Narodnik or Trudovik current or trend in Russian life that
can also be traced by drawing on other, more direct and immediate sources
of political knowledge.

Let us recall, for example, the debates in the First and Second
Dumas. Unfortunately, the verbatim reports of both have been withdrawn from
sale. Nevertheless, the immense political material they provide for
studying the views and aspirations of the Russian peasantry and Russian
Trudoviks has in part already become, and in part will in the future
become, known to every educated person. The chief conclusion to be drawn
from this material is that the Trudovik intellectuals (including
the Socialist-Revolutionary intellectuals) and the peasant
Trudoviks represent essentially distinct political trends.

The intellectual Narodniks gravitate towards conciliatory or
“philanthropic” phrases. One always senses the liberal in them. The
standpoint of the class struggle is wholly foreign to them. They are given
to moralising. They are pulling the democratic peasantry bade from
the real and direct struggle against its class enemy to vague, forced,
impotent, quasi-socialist phrase-mongering.

The peasant Narodniks in both of the early Dumas were full of fire and
passion. They were eager for direct and resolute action. They were
ignorant, uneducated and unsophisticated, but they rose against their class
enemy so straightforwardly, uncompromisingly and implacably that one
sensed what an impressive social force they were.

In other words, the Narodnik intellectuals are very bad socialists and
lukewarm democrats. The peasant Trudoviks are far from playing at
socialism, which is quite alien to them, but they are honest, sincere,
ardent and strong democrats. No one can foretell whether peasant democracy
will win in Russia, for this depends on much too complicated objective
conditions. But it is beyond doubt that the Trudovik peasantry
could win only in spite of the tendencies which the
Narodnik intelligentsia brings into the movement of the Trudovik
peasantry. A vigorous, fresh and sincere democratic movement can
win, given a favourable historical situation, whereas “socialist”
phrase-mongering and Narodnik moralising can never win.

I consider this conclusion to be one of the most important lessons of
the Russian revolution, and I cherish the hope that some day I may be able
to substantiate it by a detailed analysis of Narodnik speeches in the first
two Dumas and by other political evidence from the 1905–07 period. For the
time being I should like to note the remarkable confirmation of this
conclusion to be found in the latest issue (No. 12, 1912) of Russkoye Bogatstvo , the chief and most authoritative Narodnik organ.

Two articles in that issue produce an impression that is undoubtedly
typical. Mr. A.V.P.’s article (“Socialism—Popular or Proletarian?”) is
a specimen of the intellectualist arguments of the “Popular Socialists”
and Socialist-Revolutionaries.

If it had been inevitable for the massive force of the Russian
peasantry to be directed in the way that “results” from the
arguments of Messrs. A.V.P. and Co., the cause of Russia’s
bourgeois democrats would have been hopelessly lost. For phrase-mongering
and moralising can never result in history-making action . The impotence of this kind of Narodism is
complete.

In Mr. Kryukov’s article, “Without Fire”, the peasantry and peasant
life and psychology are described by a honey-tongued little priest, who
portrays the peasantry in just the way it itself has acted, and
continues to act. If this portrayal is accurate, Russia’s bourgeois
democrats—in the shape of the peasantry—are destined to carry out a
major historical action that has every chance of success provided the situation is at all favourable.

To make this point clear, we shall briefly describe Mr. A. V. P.’s
“ideas” and quote a few passages from the portrayal of the Russian
peasantry given by the little priest.

Mr. A. V. P. defends the foundations of Narodism against Sukhanov, a
writer for Zavety , who surrenders a whole series of cardinal theoretical premises of Narodism to Marxism, advocating a kind of
unity between Marxists and Narodniks.

Mr. A. V. P. has no objection to unity but does not pro pose to
“surrender” the principles of Narodism. And it is precisely this
defence of the purity of the principles and of the solidity of
Narodism by such an unquestionably competent and noted Narodnik as
Mr. A. V. P. that shows most clearly that his position is quite
hopeless and that this kind of Narodism is absolutely lifeless .

Mr. Sukhanov went as far as to say that the proletariat was the only
class which was socialist by nature. Of course, if we were to reason with
any degree of consistency, this means recognising Marxism and completely
giving up Narodnik socialism as a bad job.

Mr. A. V. P. is up in arms against Mr. Sukhanov, but his arguments are
exceptionally lame. They are nothing but so many little reservations,
rectifications, question marks, and eclectic comments to the effect that
revisionism “over emphasises” life’s corrections to theory, while
orthodoxy wastes its time disputing them. The hotchpotch dished up by
Mr. A. V. P. exactly resembles the objections of the “humanitarian”
bourgeois to the class struggle and class socialism—objections common in
all European countries.

Mr. A. V. P. does not venture to deny the fundamental and well-known
fact that throughout the world it is only the proletariat that wages a
systematic, daily struggle against capital, and that it alone constitutes
the mass bulwark of the socialist parties. And Mr. A. V. P. cannot but knew
that the freer a country is politically, the less the peasantry shows even feeble socialist leanings. And he simply
plays on fragments of ideas expressed by European bourgeois
professors and opportunists in order to confuse the issue, without even trying to set against Marxism anything at all like an
integral, straightforward and clear social theory.

That is why nothing could be more boring than Mr. A. V. P.’s
article. And nothing could be more indicative of the total ideological
death of Narodnik socialism in Russia. It is dead. You can find
Mr. A. V. P.’s “ideas” in full in any bourgeois social-reformist
publication in the West, so there is no point in refuting them.

But while Narodnik socialism is dead in Russia, having been
killed by the revolution of 1905 and buried by people like A. V. P., and
while nothing is left of it but rotten phrases, Russia’s peasant
democracy—a democracy that is by no means socialist but as bourgeois as
was democracy in America in the 1860s, in France at the close of the
eighteenth century, in Germany in the first half of the nineteenth century,
etc., etc.—is alive .

The honey-tongued priest’s story of the countryside, re corded by
Mr. Kryukov, fully confirms this. And let us note in passing that what
Kryukov reports perhaps stands out even more vividly and precisely from the
observations which the Vekhi-minded Bulgakov, an admitted enemy of
democracy, published in Russkaya Mysl (No. 11, 1912—“At the
Elections”).

“ Servility and cowardice have always been there!” says
Kryukov’s little priest, speaking of the Russian clergy. “But the
difference now is that there has never been so appallingly calm
and tacit a falling-away from the church as today. It is as if the spirit
of life were dead in the church. I repeat that it isn’t the intellectuals
alone who have left—so have the people.... I must admit it—after all,
I’ve been a country priest for two years.”

The honey-tongued priest recalled the year 1905 . At that time
he was busy explaining the manifesto to the peasants.

“ I had looked forward,” he wailed, “to understanding, close unity, love , sobriety, a sound mind, an awakening,
vigour.... But while understanding did seem to come, we had hatred and
internecine strife instead of solidarity and unity. And I was the very
first man to be hit by the countryside, and pretty roughly, too. Why,
didn’t I stand for it heart and soul? I told them all about those liberties
and all that sort of thing. And you should have seen how they listened! I
imagined you just couldn’t make things any clearer than I did, but
no—there were other ideas that found their way into the countryside. Besides, the new explainers made a much spicier stew—they
talked about the land and equality and the landlords. Of course, the muzhiks saw it and swallowed it at once . First of all they came to
tell me that they would pay me for tithes not two hundred rubles but one
hundred....

“ However, what vexed me particularly wasn’t that fact—about that hundred rubles—but the totality of the things
which so unexpectedly reshaped the countryside. Didn’t they all try to open
its eyes for it, to rid it of its ignorance, to lighten its darkness! And
to tell the truth, they succeeded too. A bit of light did dawn on the
blind, and they have no longer been blind since then, even though they
haven’t really recovered their eyesight. But with that half-vision came
only the most sorrowful knowledge and the most choking hatred.... Some day
they may sigh regretfully thinking of their past ignorance. There’s so much
hatred in the countryside that you’d say the very air is saturated with it
nowadays.... They are quick with the knife and the cudgel and the
fire-brand. There’s a feeling of helplessness, the sting of unavenged
grievances, internecine quarrels, indiscriminate hatred, envy of all who
are better off, who live more comfortably and own more. To be sure, there
was envy and hatred and sorrow and vile sin in the past as well, but people
had faith in the divine will and realised the futility of worldly
benefits. They had faith and were therefore able to bear it ,
hoping to be rewarded in the hereafter. That faith is no more. What people
there believe in today is that we are oppressors and they are the
oppressed. Weeds and thornapples have sprouted in the countryside from all
that talk about freedom.... And now this new law about the land—brother
has risen up against brother, son against father and neighbour against
neighbour! The hatred and discord now are such that the country side will
choke with it. it certainly will.”

We have underlined certain particularly characteristic words in this
characteristic description of the countryside by the mealy-mouthed little
priest (a genuine Narodnik intellectual!).

The priest is a partisan of “love” and an enemy of “hatred”. In
this respect he fully shares the Tolstoyan (we may also say Christian),
thoroughly reactionary point of view which our Cadets and Cadet-like people
are constantly promoting. Such a priest would hardly mind dreaming of some
sort of “socialisation of the land” or prattling about the “socialist”
significance of co-operation and about “standards of landownership”. But
when it came to hatred instead of “love”, he at once recoiled, went limp
and whimpered.

There is any amount of verbal, loud-mouthed “socialism” (“popular
and not proletarian”), and in Europe too any literate philistine approves of it. But when it comes to “hatred” instead
of “Jove”, that is the end. Socialism as humane phrase-mongering—yes,
we are for it; revolutionary democracy—no, we are against it.

What the honey-tongued little priest says on the hackneyed subject of
“hooliganism” in the countryside is absolutely nothing new from the
factual point of view. But it is evident from his own story that
“hooliganism” is a concept introduced by the feudal landlords . “Burning, unavenged grievances” is what the sugary priest
notes. And this, of course, is a very far cry from “hooliganism”.

In the struggle against Narodism, Marxists have long regarded it as
their task to smash Manilovism, cloying phrases, a sentimental supra-class
point of view, and vulgar “popular” socialism worthy of a French
“Radical Socialist” skilled in shady business deals. But, at the same
time, Marxists have long considered it just as much their indispensable
task to extract the democratic core of Narodnik views. Narodnik
socialism is a putrid and evil-smelling corpse. Peasant democracy in Russia
is a living force, if Kryukov’s honey-tongued priest has depicted it
accurately. Indeed, it cannot help being a living force so long as the
Purishkeviches are in the saddle, and so long as there are some thirty
million who are starving.

“ Indiscriminate hatred”, we are told. First of all, this is not the
whole truth. It is the Purishkeviches and government officials and amiable
intellectuals who see no “discrimination”. Secondly, even at the
beginning of the working-class movement in Russia there was a certain
element of “indiscriminate hatred”; such as that, for instance, which
took the form of destroying machinery during the strikes of the sixties,
seventies and eighties of the last century. That did not last. Nor was that
the point. It would be banal to demand that people in this situation who
were losing their patience should use “kid gloves”.

The important thing is the far-reaching break with the old, hopelessly
reactionary world outlook, the thorough assimilation of just that doctrine
about the “enslaved” that is an earnest of real life and not of the sleep
of death.

Narodnik socialism is rotten even in its most Left-wing section. What
is alive and vital is the task of purifying, enlightening, arousing and
unifying the democratic movement through a deliberate break with doctrines
of “love”, “patience”, and so on. The honey-tongued little priest is
sad We, however, have every reason to rejoice in the ample opportunities
for vigorous work.

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