and his readers. And he answers: here there is no Faubourg St. Antoine (the workers' district in Paris; cf. the article in Vperyod, No. 2[154]). The people are inclined to keep off the street and to stay at home, to protest in the Tolstoian manner by refusing to pay taxes! . . .
Do not slander the people, you bourgeois betrayers of liberty! No slander will ever cleanse the stain of your shameful cowardice. The people are shedding their blood throughout Russia. Faubourgs St. Antoine of our own are springing up in a number of towns and in countless villages. The people are waging a desperate struggle. If you had really wanted to "appeal to the people" (and not merely threaten your ally, the tsar, to do so) you should not have assigned hundreds and thousands of rubles for your talking-shops, but millions for the armed uprising. You should have elected a delegation, not to cool its heels in the antechambers of the tsar, but to make contact with the revolutionary parties, with the revolutionary people.
The tsar and his gang know only too well that you are incapable of doing so because you are afraid for your money bags, because you are afraid of the people. Therefore the tsar is entirely right in treating you as flunkeys; in feeding you the same old promises, the same old Bulygin Constitution; in assuming that you will not dare to make even a real, emphatic protest, not even against that Bulygin sop. Small wonder that the special correspondent of the Journal de Genève, a "respectable" liberal paper, wrote recently: "The liberals do not conceal from themselves the imperfections [!] of the Bulygin plan, but they think it should be accepted in the interests of order and progress. . . . To reject the government's plan would mean deliberately to destroy the last hope for a peaceful outcome to the present conflict between the
people and the bureaucratic regime. " (The last sentence is underscored by the correspondent himself.)
The bourgeoisie wants peace with the tsar and fears the war of the people against the tsar. The tsar wants peace with the bourgeoisie, but does not fear the war with the people, which he has started and is ruthlessly continuing. Is it not obvious that if the people fail to achieve complete victory in spite of the treachery of the bourgeoisie, the inevitable outcome of this situation will be the Bulygin Constitution?
NOTES
[154]
The reference is to A. V. Lunacharsky's article "Outline of the History of the Revolutionary Struggle of the European Proletariat", published in Vperyod, No. 2, January 14 (1), 1905.
[p. 575]