The Fourth Duma Election Campaign and the Tasks of the Revolutionary Social-Democrats

Sotsial-Demokrat, No. 26,

May 8 (April 25), 1912
Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 18, pp. 17-21.

The political strikes and the first demonstrations over the Lena shootings show that the revolutionary movement among the masses of workers in Russia is growing. This thickening of the revolutionary atmosphere casts a vivid light on the tasks of the Party and its role in the election campaign.

The crisis is growing in a new situation. The reactionary Duma, a which provides the landlords with power, the bourgeoisie with an arena for making deals, and the proletariat with a small platform, is a necessary factor in this situation. We need this platform, we need the election campaign, for our revolutionary work among the masses. We need the illegal Party to direct all this work as a whole -- in the Taurida Palace, as well as in Kazanskaya Square, at workers' mass meetings, during strikes, at district meetings of worker Social-Democrats, and at open trade union meetings. Only the hopelessly blind can fail even now to see the utter absurdity and perniciousness for the working class of otzovism and liquidationism, those products of decay and disintegration during the period of the triumph of counter-revolution. The example of the Narodniks has shown us clearly the scandalous zero one gets as the result of adding the liquidationism of the "Trudoviks", as well as of the legally functioning writers of Russkoye Bogatstvo  and Sovremennik, to the otzovism of the Socialist-Revolutionary "party".

Let us now sum up the facts brought to light during the pre-election mobilisation of political forces. Three camps stand out clearly: (1) The Rights -- from Purishkevich to Guchkov -- are pro-government. The Black-Hundred landlord and the conservative merchant are heart and soul for the government. (2) The liberal bourgeois -- the "Progressists" and the Cadets, along with groups of various non-Russians -- are against the government and against the revolution. The counter-revolutionary nature of the liberals is one of the main features of the present historical juncture. Whoever does not see this counter-revolutionary nature of the "cultured" bourgeoisie has forgotten everything and learned nothing, and takes the name of democrat, to say nothing of socialist, in vain. As it happens, the Trudoviks and "our" liquidators see poorly and understand things poorly! (3) The democratic camp, in which only the revolutionary Social-Democrats, the anti-liquidationists, united and organised, have firmly and clearly unfurled their own banner, the banner of revolution. The Trudoviks and our liquidators are vacillating between the liberals and the democrats, between legal opposition and revolution.

The class roots which brought about the division between the first two camps are clear. But the liberals have succeeded in leading astray many people, from Vodovozov to Dan, as to the class roots which divided the second camp from the third. The liberal "strategy", naïvely blurted out by Blank in Zaprosy Zhizni, is very simple: the Cadets are the centre of the opposition, the thill-horse; the outrunners (the "flanks") are the Progressists on the right, and the Trudoviks and the liquidators on the left. It is on this "troika" that the Milyukovs, in their role of "responsible opposition", hope to "ride" to triumph.

The hegemony of the liberals in the Russian emancipation movement has always meant, and will always mean, defeat for this movement. The liberals manoeuvre between the monarchy of the Purishkeviches and the revolution of the workers and peasants, betraying the latter at every serious juncture. The task of the revolution is to use the liberals' fight against the government and to neutralise their vacillations and treachery.

The policy of the liberals is to scare Purishkevich and Romanov a little with the prospect of revolution, in order to share power with them and jointly suppress the revolution.

And it is the class position of the bourgeoisie that determines this policy. Hence the Cadets' cheap "democracy" and their actual fusion with the most moderate "Progressists" of the type of Yefremov, Lvov, Ryabushinsky and Co.

The tactics of the proletarian Party should be to use the fight between the liberals and the Purishkeviches over the division of power -- without in any way allowing "faith" in the liberals to take hold among the people -- in order to develop, intensify and reinforce the revolutionary onslaught of the masses, which overthrows the monarchy and entirely wipes out the Purishkeviches and Romanovs. At the elections, its tactics should be to unite the democrats against the Rights and against the Cadets by "using" the liberals' fight against the Rights in cases of a second ballot, in the press and at meetings. Hence the necessity for a revolutionary platform that even now goes beyond the bounds of "legality". Hence the slogan of a republic -- as against the liberals' "constitutional" slogans, slogans of a "Rasputin- Treshchenkov constitution".[9] Our task is to train an army of champions of the revolution everywhere, always, in all forms of work, in every field of activity, at every turn of events which may be forced on us by a victory of reaction, the treachery of the liberals, the protraction of the crisis, etc.

Look at the Trudoviks. They are Narodnik liquidators sans phrases. "We are revolutionaries," Mr. Vodovozov "hints", "but -- we can't go against Article 129,[10] he adds. A hundred years after Herzen's birth, the "party" of the peasant millions is unable to publish even a sheet -- even a hectographed one! -- in defiance of Article 129!! While gravitating towards a bloc "first of all" with the Social-Democrats, the Trudoviks are unable to say clearly that the Cadets are counter-revolutionary, to lay the foundations for a republican peasant party. Yet that is exactly how the question stands after the lessons of 1905-07 and 1908-11: either fight for a republic, or lick the boots of Purishkevich and grovel under the whips of Markov and Romanov. There is no other choice for the peasants.

Look at the liquidators. No matter how much the Martynovs, Martovs and Co. shift and shuffle, any conscientious and sensible reader will recognise that R-kov summed up their views when he said: "Let there be no illusion. What is in the making is the triumph of a very moderate bourgeois progressism." The objective meaning of this winged phrase is the following: revolution is an illusion, the real thing is to support the "Progressists". Surely anyone who does not deliberately close his eyes must see now that it is precisely this that the Dans and Martovs are saying, in slightly different words, when they issue the slogan: "Wrest the Duma [the Fourth Duma, a landlord-ridden Duma!][*] from the hands of the reactionaries"? Or when they make, again and again, the slip of referring to two camps? Or when they shout, "Do not frustrate" the progressive work of the liberal bourgeois? Or when they fight against a "Left bloc"? Or when, writing in Zhivoye Dyelo, they smugly snap their fingers at "the literature published abroad which nobody reads"? Or when they actually content themselves with a legal platform and legal attempts at organisation? Or when they form "initiating groups" of liquidators, thus breaking with the revolutionary R.S.D.L.P.? Is it not clear that this is also the tune sung by the Levitskys, who are lending philosophical depth to the liberal ideas about the struggle for right, by the Nevedomskys, who have lately "revised" Dobrolyubov's ideas backwards -- from democracy to liberalism -- and by the Smirnovs, who are making eyes at "progressism", and by all the other knights of Nasha Zarya and Zhivoye Dyelo ?

Actually the democrats and the Social-Democrats, even if they had wanted to, would never have been able to "frustrate" a victory of the "Progressists" among the landlords and bourgeois! All this is nothing but idle talk. This is not where the serious differences lie. Nor is this what constitutes the distinction between a liberal and a Social-Democratic labour policy. To "support" the Progressists on the ground that their "victories" "bring the cultured bourgeois nearer to power" is a liberal labour policy.

We Social-Democrats regard a "victory" of the Progressists as an indirect expression of a democratic upswing. It is necessary to use the skirmishes between the Progressists and the Rights -- the mere slogan of support for the Progressists is no good. Our job is to promote the democratic upswing, to foster the new revolutionary democracy that is growing in a new way in the new Russia. Unless it succeeds in gathering strength and winning in spite of the liberals, no "triumph" of the Progressists and the Cadets in the elections will bring about any serious change in the actual situation in Russia.

The democratic upswing is an indisputable fact now. It is progressing with greater difficulty, at a slower pace and along a more arduous path than we should like, but it is progressing nonetheless. It is this that we must "support" and promote by our election work and every other kind of activity. Our task is to organise the revolutionary democrats -- by ruthless criticism of Narodnik liquidationism and Narodnik otzovism to forge a republican peasant party -- but first of all and above all else to clean "our own house" of liquidationism and otzovism, intensify our revolutionary Social-Democratic work among the proletariat and strengthen the illegal Social-Democratic Labour Party. The outcome of the growing revolutionary crisis does not depend on us; it depends on a thousand different causes, on the revolution in Asia and on socialism in Europe. But it does depend on us to conduct consistent and steady work among the masses in the spirit of Marxism, and only this kind of work is never done in vain.