Published on March 27, 1907 |
Published according |
From V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, 4th English Edition,
Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1972
First printing 1962
Second printing 1965
Third printing 1972
Translated from the Russian by George Hanna
Edited by Julius Katzer
page 196
The Duma election results demonstrate the physiognomy and strength of the various classes.
The franchise in Russia is neither direct nor equal. In the first place, the peasants elect one delegate per ten households; these, in turn, elect a peasant delegate from among their number; the delegates so elected then elect a peasant elector and the latter, together with electors from other social-estates, elect the deputies to the Duma. The system is the same for the landowner, urban and worker curias, the number of electors from each curia being fixed by law in the interests and to the advantage of the upper classes, the landowners and the bourgeoisie. Furthermore, not only the revolutionary parties, but the opposition parties as well are subjected to the most barbarous, the most illegal police oppression, then there is the complete absence of freedom of the press and assembly, arbitrary arrests and banishment, as well as the military courts operating in the greater part of Russia, and the state of emergency connected with them.
How, then, under such circumstances, could the new Duma have turned out more oppositional and more revolutionary than the First?
To find an answer to this question, we must first of all examine the figures published in the Cadet Rech on the distribution of the electors according to party, in connection with the party political composition of the Second Duma; these figures cover about nine-tenths of all the electors in European Russia (Poland, the Caucasus, Siberia, etc., being excluded). Let us take the five chief po-
page 197
litical groups, since more detailed information on electors' political leanings is not available. The first group consists of the Rights. To this group belong those known as the Black Hundreds (the monarchists, the Union of the Russian People, etc.), who champion a return to complete autocracy in its purest form, favour unbridled military terror against revolutionaries, and instigate assassinations (like that of Duma Deputy Herzenstein), pogroms, etc. Further, this group includes the so-called Octobrists (this is the name given in Russia to the party of the big industrialists), who joined the counter-revolution immediately after the tsar's manifesto of October 17, 1905, and who now support the government in every possible way. This party frequently forms election blocs with the monarchists.
The second group consists of those belonging to no party. We shall see later that many electors and deputies, especially those of the peasantry, hid behind this name in order to escape repressions for their revolutionary convictions.
The liberals form the third group. The liberal parties are headed by the Constitutional-Democrats (known as the Cadet Party), or "people's freedom" party. This party constitutes the Centre in the Russian revolution; it stands between the landlords and the peasants. The bourgeoisie tries to reconcile these two classes. The assessment of this party of the liberal bourgeoisie -- the Cadets -- is a most important point of difference between the two trends within Russian Social-Democracy.
For opportunist reasons and not because of their political convictions, the Polish Black Hundreds are on the side of the Russian liberals in the Duma; this is the party of "National-Democrats" who in Poland use every means, including informing, lock-outs and assassination, to struggle against the revolutionary proletariat.
The fourth group is the Progressists. This is not the name of a party, but, like the term "non-party" is a meaningless conventional term whose primary purpose is to serve as a screen against police persecution.
Lastly, the fifth group is the Lefts. To this group belong the Social-Democratic and Socialist-Revolutionary parties, the Popular Socialists (approximately the equivalent of
page 198
the French Radical Socialists) and those known as the Trudoviks [*] -- a still completely amorphous peasant democratic organisation. In their class character, the Trudoviks, Popular Socialists and Socialist-Revolutionaries are petty bourgeois and peasant democrats. Sometimes electors from some revolutionary groups attempted to hide under the general name of "Lefts" during the election campaign, in order the better to escape police persecution.
The Rech figures will now show the correctness of the conclusions we have drawn concerning the social composition of the parties.
As can be seen from the tables (on pages 199 and 200), the big cities constitute a special group -- St. Petersburg elects 6 deputies, Moscow 4, Warsaw and Tashkent 2 each, the remainder 1 each, a total of 27 deputies for 17 cities. The remaining deputies to the Duma are elected at joint meetings of electors of all four curias for each gubernia; but in addition to this the peasant electors elect one deputy from the peasant curia for each gubernia. Thus we get three groups of deputies -- from the gubernia electoral meeting, from the peasant curia and from the big cities.
A few dozen electors from the progressive or Left bloc could be ascribed to the various party groups only on the basis of estimates; on the whole, however, these figures provide the fullest and most reliable material for an understanding of the class structure of the various Russian parties.
The worker curia even in the provinces, and, needless to say, particularly in the big cities, voted almost exclusively Left, 96.5 per cent to be exact. Out of the 140 Left electors from the worker curia 84 were Social-Democrats, 52 were unspecified Lefts (but mostly Social-Democrats), and four were Socialist-Revolutionaries. Despite the false assertions of the liberals who want to depict it as a party of revolutionary intellectuals, the Russian Social-Democratic Party is, therefore, a real working-class party. In St.
Parties Fifty-One Gubernias of European
Russia Big Cities Landowner Urban Peasant Worker Total Elec- Per Elec- Per Elec- Per Elec- Per Elec- Per Elec- Per
Rights. . . .
1,224
70.9
182
13.9
764
33.8
--
--
2,170
40.0
346
20.7 Totals. . . 1,726 100 1,304 100 2,258 100 145 100 5,433 100 1,668 100
Parties 51 Gubernias of European
Russia Poland Caucasus Siberia Entire From the From From Depu- per Depu- per Depu- per Depu- per Depu- per Depu- per Depu- per
Rights. . . .
85
25.7
4
7.5
5
18.5
1
2.7
2
7.1
--
--
97
19.8 Totals. . . 331 100 53 100 27 100 37 100 28 100 14 100 490 100
Petersburg -- both the city and the gubernia -- of the twenty-four electors chosen by the worker curia twenty were Social-Democrats and four Socialist-Revolutionaries; in Moscow -- both the city and the gubernia -- only Social Democrats were elected -- thirty-five, etc.
In the peasant curia we immediately see an astonishing disproportion; 33.8 per cent of the peasant electors belong to the Right, whereas of the Duma deputies elected by those same electors from the peasant curia only 7.5 per cent were Rights. Obvious!y the peasant electors only called themselves Rights to avoid government repressions. The Russian press has recorded this phenomenon in more than a hundred cases, and the election statistics now provide full confirmation of it.
The peasant curia cannot be judged by what the electors call themselves, but exclusively by the party which their deputies consider themselves as belonging to. We see that, following upon the worker curia, the peasant curia forms the group that is most Left. The peasants elected only 7.5 per cent Rights and 67.95 per cent standing Left of the liberals ! The greater part of the Russian peasantry are revolutionary in temper -- such is the lesson to be drawn from the elections to the Second Duma. This is a fact of great importance because it shows that the revolution in Russia has not come to an end by a long way. Until the peasant's demands have been met, or, at least, until he has calmed down, the revolution must continue. Of course, the peasant's revolutionary temper has nothing in common with Social-Democracy; the peasant is a bourgeois-democratic revolutionary, and by no means a socialist. He is not struggling for the transfer of all means of production into the hands of society, but for the confiscation of the landlord's land by the peasantry.
The bourgeois-democratic, revolutionary consciousness of the peasantry finds its typical party-political expression in the Trudoviks', and in the Socialist-Revolutionary and the Popular Socialist parties. Out of the fifty-three Duma deputies from the peasant curia, twenty-four belong to the peasant democrats (ten Lefts, ten Trudoviks and four Socialist-Revolutionaries), and, furthermore, of the ten Progressists and three non-party deputies elected by the peas-
ants the majority undoubtedly belong to the Trudoviks. We say "undoubtedly" because the Trudoviks have been ruthlessly persecuted since the First Duma, and the peasants are wary enough not to call themselves Trudoviks, although in actual fact they vote together with the Trudoviks in the Duma. For example, the most important bill introduced in the First Duma by the Trudoviks was the Agrarian Bill, known as the "Draft of the 104" (the essence of this Bill was the immediate nationalisation of the landlords' land, the future nationalisation of peasant allotments and equalitarian land tenure). This Bill is an outstanding product of peasant political thought on one of the most important problems of peasant life. It was endorsed by seventy Trudoviks and by twenty-five peasants who described themselves as non-party, or gave no answer to the question on their party membership!
Thus the "Trudovik" Group in Russia is undoubtedly a rural, peasant democratic party. It comprises parties that are revolutionary not in the socialist, but in the bourgeois-democratic sense of the word.
A distinction must be made between the big cities and the smaller towns in the urban curia. The political contradictions between the different classes are not so clearly marked in the smaller towns, where there are no large masses of proletarians (who form a special worker curia) and the Rights are weaker. In the big cities there are no non-party electors at all, and the number of indeterminate "Progressists" is insignificant; but here the Right is stronger and the Left weaker. The reason is a simple one; in the big cities the proletariat constitutes a separate curia, which is not included in our table of electors.* The petty bourgeoisie are less numerous than in the smaller towns. Big industry predominates, and is represented partly by the Rights and partly by the liberals.
The figures on the composition of the electors show convincingly that the basis of the liberal parties (mainly, therefore, the Cadets) is the urban, primarily the big industrial bourgeoisie. The swing to the Right of this bourgeoisie, which is frightened by the independent action and strength of the proletariat, becomes particularly clear when we compare the larger cities and the smaller towns. The urban (i.e., bourgeois) curia is permeated with Left elements to a much greater degree in the latter.
The basic differences amongst Russian Social-Democrats are closely connected with this last problem. One wing (the Minority, or "Mensheviks") regard the Cadets and liberals as being the progressive urban bourgeoisie as compared with the backward rural petty bourgeoisie (Trudoviks). It follows from this that the bourgeoisie is recognised as the motive force of the revolution, and a policy of support for the Cadets is proclaimed. The other wing (the Majority, or "Bolsheviks") regards the liberals as representatives of big industry, who are striving to put an end to the revolution as quickly as possible for fear of the proletariat, and are entering into a compromise with the reactionaries. This wing regards the Trudoviks as revolutionary petty-bourgeois democrats, and is of the opinion that they are inclined to adopt a radical position on a land question of such importance to the peasantry, the question of the confiscation of the landed estates. This accounts for the tactics of the Bolsheviks. They reject support for the treacherous liberal bourgeoisie, i.e., the Cadets, and do their utmost to get the democratic petty bourgeoisie away from the influence of the liberals; they want to draw the peasant and the urban petty bourgeois away from the liberals and muster them behind the proletariat, behind the vanguard, for the revolutionary struggle. In its social-economic content, the Russian revolution is a bourgeois revolution; its motive force, however, is not the liberal bourgeoisie but the proletariat and the democratic peasantry. The victory of the revolution can only be achieved by a revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry.
If we want to know exactly whether the alliance between the liberals and the urban petty bourgeoisie is a stable one, we shall be interested in the statistics on the number
of votes cast in the cities for the party blocs. According to Smirnov's statistics for 22 big cities, 17,000 votes were cast for the monarchists, 34,500 for the Octobrists, 74,000 for the Cadets and 41,000 for the Left bloc.[*]
During the elections to the Second Duma a fierce struggle was waged between the two wings of Social-Democracy, between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, on the question of whether to enter into a bloc with the Cadets or with the Trudoviks against the Cadets. In Moscow the supporters of the Bolsheviks were stronger; a Left bloc was formed there, with the Mensheviks taking part in it. In St. Petersburg the Bolsheviks were also stronger, and a Left bloc was formed there as well, but the Mensheviks did not take part and withdrew from the organisation. A split occurred and still continues. The Mensheviks referred to the Black Hundred danger, i.e., they feared a victory of the Black Hundreds at the elections because of the votes of the Lefts and the liberals being split. The Bolsheviks declared that this danger was an invention of the liberals, whose one purpose was to attract petty-bourgeois and proletarian democracy under the wing of bourgeois liberals. The figures show that the total number of votes cast for the Lefts and the Cadets was more than double the combined votes cast for the Octobrists and the monarchists.** A split vote for the opposition,. therefore, could not have helped the victory of the Right.
* In the German press this party is often called the "labour group", which seems to point to kinship with the working class. In actual fact there is not even this verbal relationship between them in Russian. It is, therefore, better to leave the word "Trudoviks" untranslated, using it to mean petty-bourgeois, specifically peasant, democrats.
page 199
tors
cent
tors
cent
tors
cent
tors
cent
tors
cent
tors
cent
Non-party. .
Liberals. . .
Progressists.
Lefts . . . .
81
154
185
82
4.7
8.9
10.7
4.8
27
504
280
311
2.1
38.7
21.5
23.8
248
103
561
582
11.0
4.6
24.9
25.7
2
--
3
140
1.4
--
2.1
96.5
358
761
1,029
1,115
6.6
14.0
18.9
20.5
--
940
55
327
--
56.4
3.3
19.6
page 200
and
Eastern
Gubernias
Russian
Empire
Gubernias
Peasant
Curias
Big
Cities
ties
cent
ties
cent
ties
cent
ties
cent
ties
cent
ties
cent
ties
cent
Non-party. .
Liberals. . .
Progressists.
Lefts . . . .
18
82
20
126
5.4
24.8
6.0
38.1
3
10
10
26
5.7
18.9
18.9
49.0
--
17
--
5
--
63.0
--
18.5
--
32
3
4
--
86.5
8.1
2.7
--
9
2
15
--
32.2
7.1
53.6
1
6
--
7
7.1
42.9
--
50.0
22
156
35
180
4.5
31.8
7.1
36.8
page 201
page 202
* There are no data for this, and so the figures on electors from the worker curia have been removed from the table. We have precise figures on only 37 worker electors. All of them, without exception, belong to the Left. According to the law, the total number of worker electors for the whole of Russia is 208. We have more precise data concerning 145 of them, which, together with the above mentioned 37 electors from the worker curia in the big cities makes 182, i.e., nine-tenths of the total number of worker-electors.
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