NOTES
[14] September 21 (October 4), 1909, was the date fixed for the by-election to the Third Duma to replace the St. Petersburg deputy, the Cadet A. M. Kolyubakin, who had been expelled from the Duma.
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[15] The Party of Octobrists (Union of October Seventeenth) was founded in Russia after the issue of the tsar's Manifesto of October 17, 1905. It was a counter-revolutionary party which represented and defended the interests of the big bourgeoisie and landlords, whose enterprises were on capitalist lines. It was headed by the well-known industrialist and Moscow house-owner, A. I. Guchkov, and the big landlord M. V. Rodzyanko. The Octobrists supported the foreign and domestic policy of the tsarist government.
Black Hundreds -- reactionary, monarchist gangs set up by the tsarist police to combat the revolutionary movement. They murdered revolutionaries, assaulted progressive intellectuals, and organised anti-Jewish pogroms.
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[16] Cadets -- members of the Constitutional-Democratic Party, the chief party of the Russian liberal-monarchist bourgeoisie. The Cadet Party was founded in October 1905, its membership including representatives of the bourgeoisie, Zemstvo functionaries from among the landlords and bourgeois intellectuals. Prominent leaders of the Cadets included P. N. Milyukov, S. A. Muromtsev, V. A. Maklakov, A. I. Shingaryov, P. B. Struve, F. I. Rodichev. In order to deceive the working people the Cadets falsely called themselves the party of "people's freedom", but in reality they never went beyond the demand for a constitutional monarchy. They considered their main task to be the fight against the revolutionary movement and they tried to persuade the tsar and the feudal landlords to share power with them. During the First World War the Cadets actively supported the tsarist government's foreign Policy of conquest. During the bourgeois-democratic revolution of February 1917 they tried to save the monarchy. The Cadets in the bourgeois Provisional Government pursued a counter-revolutionary policy favourable to the U.S., British and French imperialists. After the victory of the Great October Socialist Revolution the Cadets became irreconcilable enemies of Soviet power and participated in all the armed counter-revolutionary actions and campaigns of the interventionists. When the interventionists and white guards were defeated, the Cadets fled abroad, where they continued their anti-Soviet, counter-revolutionary activity.
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page 453
[17] The coup d'état of June 3,
1907 was carried out by the tsarist government, which dissolved the Second Duma and published a new electoral law that reduced severalfold the already small representation of workers and peasants in the Duma. The law deprived a large part of the population of Asiatic Russia of electoral rights and reduced by half the representation of the people of Poland and the Caucasus. Black Hundreds and Octobrists predominated in the Third Duma, which was elected on the basis of this law, and opened in November 1907.
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[18] Milyukov,
P. N. -- leader of the Cadet Party.
Stolypin, P. A. -- a reactionary statesman of tsarist Russia and a big landlord, Chairman of the Council of Ministers and the Minister of the Interior from 1906 to 1911. He headed the regime of savage political reaction after the suppression of the 1905-07 Revolution and organised bloody acts of repression against the revolutionary workers and peasants.
[p. 25]
[19] Rech (Speech
) -- a daily newspaper, the central organ of the Cadet Party, which was published in St. Petersburg from February 1906. It was closed down by the Revolutionary Military Committee of the Petrograd Soviet on October 26 (November 8), 1917.
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[20] Kutler,
N. N. -- a prominent leader of the Cadet Party.
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[21] Vekhi -- a Cadet collection of articles by N. Berdayev, S. Bulgakov, P. Struve, M. Herschensohn and other representatives of the counter-revolutionary liberal bourgeoisie, published in Moscow in the spring of 1909. In articles on the Russian intelligentsia these writers tried to discredit the revolutionary-democratic traditions of the finest representatives of the Russian people, including V. G. Belinsky and N. G. Chernyshevsky, vilified the revolutionary movement of 1905, and thanked the tsarist government for having, "with its bayonets and jails", saved the bourgeoisie from "the fury of the people". The writers called upon the intelligentsia to serve the autocracy. Lenin compared the programme of
Vekhi, as regards both philosophy and publicist matters, to that of the Black-Hundred newspaper
Moskovskiye Vedomosti, and he called the symposium an "encyclopaedia of liberal renegacy", nothing but a veritable torrent of reactionary mud poured on the head of democracy (see p. 123-31 of this volume [Transcriber's Note: See Lenin's "Concerning
Vekhi". -- DJR]).
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[22] The expression "His Majesty's Opposition" was used by the leader of the Cadet Party, P. Milyukov. In a speech at a luncheon given by the Lord Mayor of London on June 19 (July 2), 1909, Milyukov declared: "So long as there is in Russia a legislative chamber which controls the budget, the Russian opposition will remain the opposition of His Majesty and not to His Majesty." (Rech No. 167, June 21 [July 4], 1909).
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[23] Trudoviks,
Trudovik group -- the group of petty-bourgeois democrats in the State Dumas, consisting of peasants and intellectuals of a
Narodnik persuasion. The Trudovik group was formed in April 1906 from peasant deputies in the First Duma.
The Trudoviks put forward demands for the removal of all social-estate and national restrictions, the democratisation of Zemstvo and urban self-government, and the establishment of universal suffrage for elections to the Duma. The agrarian programme of the Trudoviks was based on Narodnik principles of equalitarian use of the land: the formation of a national fund from state, crown and church lands, and also from privately owned lands if the size of the holding exceeded the established labour norm. It was envisaged that there would be compensation for the privately owned land to be nationalised. Lenin pointed out that the typical Trudovik was a peasant who was "not averse to a compromise with the monarchy, to settling down quietly on his own plot of land under the bourgeois system; but at the present time his main efforts are concentrated on the fight against the landlords for land, on the fight against the feudal state and for democracy" (see present edition, Vol. 11, p. 229 [Transcriber's Note: See Lenin's "An Attempt at a Classification of the Political Parties of Russia". --
DJR]).
In the Duma the Trudoviks wavered between the Cadets and the Social-Democrats. These waverings were due to the class nature of the small peasant farmers. Nevertheless, owing to the fact that the Trudoviks represented the mass of the peasants, the Bolsheviks in the Duma pursued a policy of concluding agreements with them on particular questions for a joint struggle against the tsarist autocracy and the Cadets. In 1917, the Trudovik group merged with the Popular Socialist Party and actively supported the bourgeois Provisional Government. After the October Socialist Revolution the Trudoviks sided with the bourgeois counter-revolution.
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