V. I.

Lenin

Among the bills on civil liberties submitted to the Duma by
the Cadets there is one on assembly.

The Cadets consider themselves a democratic party. They must realise
that an assembly bill submitted to the Fourth Duma has a purely propaganda
value, i.e., that the purpose of its submission to the house is the
propaganda, dissemination and explanation of the principles of freedom of
assembly.

It is from this point of view that the Cadet bill must be
appraised—will it help explain to the population of Russia the
significance of freedom of assembly, the importance of that freedom and the
conditions under which it can be achieved?

It will not. The bill has been drawn up by liberal civil servants,
not by democrats. It contains a mass of absurd, bureaucratic
rules, but not what is needed from the stand point of democracy.

Meetings are forbidden on railway lines (§ 3) or within a distance
of one

verst [1] of the building where the State Duma is in session, etc. (§ 4); a
preliminary announcement is required in towns but not in villages
(§§ 6 and 7), and so on—what is all this? What is the need for
all this miserable, ridiculous, pitiful bureaucratic nonsense?

It has all been copied from European counter-revolutionary
laws, every bit of it reeks of periods when democracy was under suspicion
or suppressed, and it is all hopelessly out of date. It is in the towns,
for example, that public meetings are announced in the newspapers—so why
this idiotic fuss about “announcements”? For the sole reason that the Cadets want to show
the powers that be that they, the Cadets, have a “statesmanly” point of
view, that they are “people of law and order” (i.e., enemies of
democracy), and that they are “also able to appreciate” civil service
pettifoggery.

There is nothing important or serious in the bill as far as present-day
democracy is concerned. What the masses need are premises in which to hold
meetings. We need a law to the effect that, on the demand of, say,
a definite small number of citizens, all public buildings,
schools, etc., must be made available to the people for meetings,
free and unhindered, in the evenings and, in general, in non-working
hours. This is done in France, and there can be no other obstacles to this
democratic custom than the barbarity of the Purishkeviches.

The fact of the matter is that the whole spirit of the Cadet bill on
civil liberties, its whole content, is not democratic but liberal
bureaucratic.

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Notes:
[1]

* Verst=0.66 miles.— Ed .