* The views here set forth are closely bound up with the criticism of our Party programme. In issue No. 21 of Proletary this criticism was touched on as a private opinion; in subsequent issues the question will be dealt with in detail.[159]
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of conciliation and compromise. The question is clear. Either a bold call for a peasant revolution, even including a republic, and the thorough ideological and organisational preparation of such a revolution in alliance with the proletariat. Or useless whining, political and ideological impotence in face of the Stolypin-landlord-Octobrist attack on the village commune.
Make your choice -- those who still have left in them a particle of civic courage and sympathy for the peasant masses! The proletariat has already made its choice, and the Social-Democratic Labour Party, now more firmly than ever before, will explain, propagate, spread among the masses the slogan of a peasant uprising in alliance with the proletariat as the only possible means of thwarting the Stolypin method of "renovating" Russia.
We will not say that this method is impracticable -- it has been tested more than once in Europe on a smaller scale -- but we shall make it clear to the people that it can be realised only by endless acts of violence of the minority over the majority in the course of decades and by the mass extermination of the progressive peasantry. We shall not devote ourselves to patching up Stolypin's revolutionary projects, or attempting to improve them, weaken their effect, and so on. We shall respond by intensifying our agitation among the masses, especially among those sections of the proletariat that have ties with the peasantry. The peasant deputies -- even though sifted through a number of police sieves, even though elected by landlords, even though intimidated by the Duma die-hards -- have quite recently shown what their true strivings are. A group of non-party peasants, some of them from the Right wing, have declared, as we know from the newspapers, for compulsory alienation of the land and for local land institutions elected by the whole population ! No wonder one Cadet stated in the Land Committee that a Right-wing peasant was more Left than the Cadets. Yes, on the agrarian question the stand of the "Right" peasants in all three Dumas has been more Left than the Cadets', thereby proving that the monarchism of the muzhik is naïveté that is dying out, in contrast to the monarchism of the liberal businessmen, who are monarchists through class calculation.
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The tsar of the feudal-minded gentry shouted at the non-party peasants that he would not stand for compulsory alienation. Let the working class in reply shout to the millions of "non-party" peasants that it calls them to the mass struggle for the overthrow of tsarism and for the confiscation of the landlords' lands.