the real government? And would not that committee readily admit into its ranks representatives of that section of the unions and of the "Union of Unions"[5] which is really revolutionary and really supports the proletariat in its relentless struggle for freedom? The essential thing is that the main, purely proletarian body of the provisional revolutionary government should be strong and that for, say, hundreds of workers, sailors, soldiers and peasants there should be dozens of deputies from the unions of the revolutionary intelligentsia. I believe the proletarians will soon be able in practice to establish the proper ratio.
The objection may be raised that it is hardly possible to advance for such a government a programme complete enough to ensure victory for the revolution and broad enough to make possible a fighting alliance free from all reservations, vagueness, reticence or hypocrisy. I shall answer: such a programme has already been advanced in full by reality. It is already recognised in principle by all the politically conscious elements of absolutely all the classes and sections of the population, including even Orthodox priests. The complete realisation of political freedom, which the tsar has promised so hypocritically, should come first in this programme. The repeal of all legislation restricting freedom of speech, conscience, assembly, the press, association and strikes, and the abolition of all institutions
page 25
limiting these liberties, should be immediate and real, they should be guaranteed and actually put into practice. The programme should provide for the convocation of a national constituent assembly that would enjoy the support of a free and armed people and have full authority and strength to establish a new order in Russia. It should provide for the arming of the people. The necessity of arming the people is realised by all. What remains to be done is to complete and unify the work already begun and being carried on everywhere. The programme of the provisional revolutionary government should also provide for the immediate granting of real and full freedom to the nationalities oppressed by the tsarist monster. A free Russia has been born. The proletariat is at its post. It will not allow heroic Poland to be crushed again. It will itself go into action; it will fight both for a free Russia and a free Poland, not only by peaceful strikes, but by force of arms as well. The programme should provide for the eight-hour working day, which the workers are already "seizing", and for other urgent measures to curb capitalist exploitation. Lastly, the programme must necessarily include transfer of all the land to the peasants, support for every revolutionary measure that the peasantry is carrying out to take away all the land (without, of course, supporting the illusion of "equalised" small land tenure), and the establishment everywhere of revolutionary peasants' committees, which have already begun to take shape spontaneously.
Who but the Black Hundreds and the Black-Hundred government will deny today the pressing character and practical indispensability of this programme? In fact, even bourgeois liberals are willing to accept it in theory! As for us, we must put it into practice with the help of the forces of the revolutionary people; to do this, we must unite those forces as speedily as possible through the proletariat proclaiming a provisional revolutionary government. True, only an armed uprising can really form the basis of such a government. But the projected government will in fact be the organ of this growing and already maturing uprising. The formation of a revolutionary government could not be initiated in practice until the insurrection had assumed proportions evident to all, proportions that were, so to
page 26
speak, tangible to all. But now is the time to unify this uprising politically, to organise it, to give it a clear-cut programme, to turn all the contingents of the revolutionary army, which are already numerous and are growing fast in strength, into the mainstay and into instruments of this new, truly free and truly popular government. The struggle is imminent, the uprising inevitable, and the decisive battle close at hand. It is time to issue a direct challenge, to set the organised power of the proletariat against the decaying tsarist regime, to address to the whole people a manifesto on behalf of the provisional revolutionary government constituted by the foremost workers.
It is now obvious to us that among the revolutionary people there can be found persons capable of accomplishing this great task, persons thoroughly devoted to the revolution, and more important still, persons of tireless, inexhaustible energy. It is now obvious to us that there exist the elements of a revolutionary army, which will back this cause, and that all who are fair-minded and alert and politically-conscious in every class of the population will turn away completely from tsarism when the new government declares a decisive war on the dying semi-feudal, police state of Russia.
Citizens -- it would be proper to say in that declaration of war, in that manifesto of the revolutionary government -- citizens, make your choice! There we have the whole of old Russia, all the sinister forces of exploitation, oppression, and violence against man. And here we have a union of free citizens who have equal rights in all affairs of the state. There we have a union of exploiters, of the wealthy, of policemen. And here we have a union of all working people, of all the vital forces of the people, of all fair-minded intellectuals. There we have the Black Hundreds, here we have the organised workers fighting for freedom, for education, for socialism.
Make your choice, citizens! Here is our programme, which has long since been put forward by the whole people. These are our aims in the name of which we declare war on the Black-Hundred government. We are not trying to impose on the people any innovations thought up by us, we are merely taking the initiative in bringing about that without
page 27
which it is impossible to live in Russia any longer, as is acknowledged generally and unanimously. We do not shut ourselves off from the revolutionary people but submit to their judgement every step and every decision we take. We rely fully and solely on the free initiative of the working masses themselves. We unite absolutely all revolutionary parties, and we call into our ranks deputies from every group of the population that is willing to fight for freedom, for our programme, which guarantees the elementary rights and meets the elementary needs of the people. In particular, we hold out our hand to our worker comrades in soldier's uniform and to our peasant brothers, so that we may fight together to the end against the yoke of the landlords and the bureaucrats, for land and freedom.
Prepare for the decisive struggle, citizens! We will not allow the Black-Hundred government to use violence against Russia. We will not be deluded by the replacement of a few bureaucrats or by the resignation of a few police officers while the whole mass of Black-Hundred police retains the power to kill, plunder and commit outrages against the people. Let the liberal bourgeois stoop to pleading with that Black-Hundred government. The Black Hundreds laugh when anyone threatens them with trial in the very same old tsarist court by the very same old tsarist officials. We shall order our army units to arrest the Black-Hundred heroes who fuddle ignorant people with vodka and corrupt them; we shall commit all those monsters, such as the chief of police in Kronstadt, for public, revolutionary trial by the whole people.
Citizens, everyone but the Black Hundreds has turned away from the tsarist government. Rally, then, behind the revolutionary government, stop paying any duties or taxes, and bend all your energies to organise and arm a free people's militia force. Russia will have genuine freedom only insofar as the revolutionary people gain the upper hand over the forces of the Black-Hundred government. There are not, and cannot be, any neutrals in a civil war. The white-flag party is sheer cowardly hypocrisy. Whoever shies away from the struggle bolsters up Black-Hundred rule. Who is not for the revolution is against the revolution. Who is not a revolutionary is one of the Black Hundreds.
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We undertake to rally and train forces for an uprising of the people. Let there not be a trace left of the institutions of tsarist power in Russia by the anniversary of that great day, the Ninth of January.[6] May the spring holiday of the world proletariat find Russia already a free country, with a freely convened constituent assembly of the whole people!
That is how I visualise the development of the Soviet of Workers' Deputies into a provisional revolutionary government. And these first and foremost are the tasks that I would set all our Party organisations, all class-conscious workers, the Soviet itself, the workers' forthcoming congress in Moscow, and the congress of the Peasant Union.[7]
NOTES
[1] "Our Tasks and the Soviet of Workers Deputies
" -- an article appraising the Soviets for the first time as an organ of insurrection and the rudiments of a new revolutionary power. It was written by Lenin early in November 1905 in Stockholm, where he stayed for a while on his way back to Russia from exile. He contributed the article to
Novaya Zhizn which, however, did not publish it. The manuscript was not discovered until the autumn of 1940.
[p. 17]
[2] Novaya Zhizn (New Life
)--the first legal Bolshevik newspaper, published daily from October 27 (November 9) to December 3 (16), 1905, in St. Petersburg. Lenin became the editor of the paper upon his return to Russia early in November 1905. The paper was the virtual Central Organ of the R.S.D.L.P. V. V. Vorovsky, M. S. Olminsky and A. V. Lunacharsky were closely associated with the paper, and Maxim Gorky contributed articles and appreciable funds.
The paper had a circulation of up to 80,000 though it was constantly persecuted, 15 issues out of 27 being confiscated and destroyed. It was closed by the government after issue No. 27; issue No. 28, which was the last, appeared illegally.
[p. 19]
[3] Socialist-Revolutionary Party -- a petty-bourgeois party in Russia, which arose at the end of 1901 and the beginning of 1902 as a result of the amalgamation of various Narodnik groups and circles (Socialist-Revolutionary Union, Socialist-Revolutionary Party, etc.). The newspaper
Revolutsionnaya Rossiya (Revolutionary Russia ) (1900-05) and the journal
Vestnik Russkoi Revolutsii (Herald of the Russian Revolution ) (1901-05) became its official organs. The Socialist-Revolutionaries did not see the class distinctions between the proletarian and the small proprietor. They glossed over the class differentiation and antagonisms within the peasantry, and repudiated the leading role of the proletariat in the revolution. Their views were an eclectic mixture of the ideas of Narodism and revisionism; they tried as Lenin put it, to "patch up the rents in the Narodnik ideas with bits of fashionable opportunist 'criticism' of Marxism" (see present edition, Vol. 9, p. 310 [Transcriber's Note: See Lenin's "Socialism and the Peasantry". --
DJR]). The tactics of individual terrorism, which the Socialist-Revolutionaries advocated as the basic method of struggle against the autocracy, caused great harm to the revolutionary movement and made it difficult to organise the masses for the revolutionary struggle.
The agrarian programme of the Socialist-Revolutionaries envisaged the abolition of private landownership and the transfer of
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the land to the village communes on the basis of the "labour principle", "equalised" land tenure, and the development of co-operatives. There was nothing socialist in this programme, which the Socialist-Revolutionaries described as a programme for "socialising the land".
The Bolshevik Party exposed the Socialist-Revolutionaries' attempts to pose as socialists; it waged a hard fight against the Socialist-Revolutionaries to gain influence over the peasantry, and revealed the harmful effect which their tactics of individual terrorism had on the working-class movement. At the same time, on definite conditions, the Bolsheviks entered into temporary agreements with the Socialist-Revolutionaries in the struggle against tsarism.
In analysing the Socialist-Revolutionary programme, Lenin showed that if commodity production and private farming on commonly-owned land were preserved, the rule of capital could not be eliminated nor the labouring peasantry delivered from exploitation and ruin. He also showed that co-operatives functioning under the capitalist system could not save the small peasant, since they only served to enrich the rural bourgeoisie. At the same time Lenin pointed out that the demand for equalised land tenure, though not socialist, was historically progressive, revolutionary democratic in character, being directed against reactionary landlordism.
The fact that the peasantry did not constitute a homogeneous class accounted for the political and ideological disunity and organisational confusion among the Socialist-Revolutionaries, and for their constant wavering between the liberal bourgeoisie and the proletariat. There was a split in the Socialist-Revolutionary Party as early as the period of the first Russian revolution. Its Right wing formed the legal Labour Popular-Socialist Party, which held views close to those of the Cadets; the Left wing became the semi-anarchist league of "Maximalists". During the Stolypin reaction the Socialist-Revolutionary Party experienced a complete ideological and organizational break-up, and the First World War saw most Socialist-Revolutionaries adopt social-chauvinist views.
After the victory of the February bourgeois-democratic revolution in 1917 the Socialist-Revolutionaries, together with the Mensheviks and Cadets formed the mainstay of the counter-revolutionary bourgeois-landlord Provisional Government, and the leaders of this party (Kerensky, Avksentyev and Chernov) were members of this government. The Socialist-Revolutionary Party refused to support the peasants' demand for the abolition of landlordism. and indeed, stood for its maintenance. Socialist-Revolutionary ministers in the Provisional Government sent punitive expeditions against the peasants who had seized landed estates. Late in November 1917 the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries founded an independent party. To retain their influence among the peasant masses, they recognised the Soviet power in form and entered into an agreement with the Bolsheviks, but soon began to fight against the Soviet power.
During the years of foreign military intervention and civil war the Socialist-Revolutionaries carried on counter-revolutionary subversive activities, vigorously supported the interventionists
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and whiteguard generals, took part in counter-revolutionary plots, and organised terrorist acts against Soviet statesmen and Communist Party leaders. After the Civil War they continued their activities against the Soviet state within the country and among the whiteguard émigrés.
[p. 22]
[4] The reference is to the all-Russian political strike in October 1905.
[p. 24]
[5] The Union of Unions -- a political organisation of the liberal-bourgeois intelligentsia. It was founded in May 1905 at the first congress of 14 associations of lawyers, writers, doctors, engineers, teachers, etc. The congress demanded the convocation of a constituent assembly by universal suffrage. In July 1905 the Union declared for boycotting the Bulygin Duma- but before long it abandoned that stand, and decided to take part in the Duma elections. By the end of 1906 the Union had fallen apart.
[p. 24]
[6] On January 9,
1905, by order of the tsar, the troops fired on a peaceful demonstration of St. Petersburg unarmed workers who marched with their wives and children to the Winter Palace to present a petition to the tsar describing their intolerable conditions and utter lack of rights. This massacre of unarmed workers started a wave of mass political strikes and demonstrations all over Russia under the slogan "Down with the autocracy!" The events of January 9 marked the beginning of the 1905-07 revolution.
[p. 28]
[7] All-Russian Peasant Union -- a revolutionary-democratic organisation founded in 1905. Its programme and tactics were elaborated at its first and second congresses, held in Moscow in August and November 1905. The Union demanded political freedom and the immediate convocation of a constituent assembly. It adopted the tactics of boycotting the First State Duma. Its agrarian programme provided for the abolition of private landownership and for transfer of the lands belonging to monasteries, the Church, the Crown and the government to the peasants without compensation. The Union pursued a half-way and erratic policy; while demanding abolition of the landed estates, it agreed to partial compensation of the landlords. An object of police reprisals from the first, it had ceased to exist by the end of 1906.
[p. 28]