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Judas Golovlyov[172]falls far short in comparison with this parliamentarian! A professor at the Duma rostrum going into raptures over the splendid example set by the highest dignitaries. . . . But why talk of an Octobrist when the liberals and bourgeois democrats are not far removed from this toadyism.
Let us pass to the speech made by Mr. Izolsky, the Minister for Foreign Affairs. All he needed, of course, was a peg of the kind which Kapustin so obligingly offered. And the Minister dilated on the need for retrenchment -- or for revising the staff lists in order to help ambassadors "who have no independent means". Izvolsky stressed that he was speaking with the permission of Nicholas II, and sang praises to "the strength, intelligence, and patriotism of the Russian people", who would "exert all their energies, both material and spiritual, for consolidating Russia's present Asiatic possessions and developing them to the utmost".
The Minister said what the camarilla told him to say. Then Mr. Milyukov, the leader of the opposition, spoke. He declared straightaway: "The Party of People's Freedom, represented by the Duma group present here, has listened to the words of the Foreign Minister with profound satisfaction, and considers it its duty to applaud his first public statement made before the country's representative assembly clarifying questions concerning Russian foreign policy. Without a doubt, at the present moment . . . the Russian Government needs . . . to have the backing of Russian public opinion for its views."
Indeed, there is no doubt about that at all. For their intentions the government of the counter-revolution needs the backing of what abroad could be taken for (or be passed off as) Russian public opinion. This is particularly necessary in order to receive a loan, without which the whole Stolypin policy of tsarism, planned with a view to long-range measures of systematic and mass violence against the people, is faced with the threat of bankruptcy and ruin.
Mr. Milyukov quite understood the true significance of this ceremonial entrance of Izvolsky, Guchkov, and Co. This entrance was arranged by the Black-Hundred gang of Nicholas II. Every little detail of this police-patriotic demonstration was planned in advance. The Duma puppets
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enacted a comedy, dancing to the tune of the autocratic camarilla, for without the support of the West-European bourgeoisie Nicholas II could not hold out. The entire Russian bourgeoisie, Left as well as Right, had to be made to formally express its confidence in the government, in its "peaceful policy", its stability, its intentions and ability to pacify and tranquillise. It was necessary as the blank endorsement of a bill. For that purpose, Mr. Izvolsky was brought into play as being most "pleasing" to the Cadets; for that purpose all that impudent hypocrisy was organised about the saving of public money, about reforms, aud the government's "public" statement "clarifying" its foreign policy, although it was clear to one and all that it clarified nothing and that there was no intention that it should clarify anything.
As for the liberal opposition, they dutifully fulfilled the role of puppets in the hands of the Black-Hundred-police monarchy. At a time when an explicit statement of the truth by the Duma bourgeois minority would undoubtedly have played an important role and have prevented (or hindered) the government from borrowing thousands of millions for new punitive expeditions, gallows, prisons, and intensified security measures, the party of the Cadets "prostrated themselves" before the adored monarch in an effort to ingratiate themselves. Mr. Milyukov curried favour by trying to prove his patriotism. He posed as an expert on foreign policy, on the basis of having obtained information in some antechamber about Izvolsky's liberal views. Mr. Milyukov deliberately endorsed the bill by solemnly "applauding" the tsarist minister on behalf of the whole Cadet Party, knowing full well that on the very next day all the European newspapers would declare, as if under orders: The Duma has unanimously (not counting the Social-Democrats) expressed confidence in the government, has approved its foreign policy. . . .
In three years Russian liberalism has gone through an evolution which, in Germany, took over thirty years, and in France over a hundred -- an evolution from adherents of freedom to spineless and contemptible henchmen of absolutism. The specific weapon of struggle which the bourgeoisie possesses -- the possibility of putting pressure on the purse, of withholding funds, of upsetting the "delicate"
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approaches for new loans -- this weapon could have been used by the Cadets many times during the Russian revolution. And on each occasion, in the spring of 1908 just as in the spring of 1906, they surrendered their weapon to the enemy, licking the hand of the pogrom-makers and swearing loyalty to them.
Mr. Struve took care in good time to put this practice on a firm theoretical basis. In the magazine Russkaya Mysl, which should really be called Black-Hundred Mysl,[173] Mr. Struve already advocates the idea of a "Great Russia", the idea of bourgeois nationalism; he attacks "the intelligentsia's hostility to the state", for the thousandth time striking out at "Russian revolutionism", "Marxism", "renegades", the "class struggle", and "banal radicalism".
We can only rejoice at this evolution in the ideology of Russian liberalism, for in fact it has already shown itself in the Russian revolution to be exactly what Mr. Struve has been trying systematically, wholeheartedly, deliberately and "philosophically" to make it. The elaboration of a consistent counter-revolutionary ideology is the key when there is a fully developed class that has acted in a counter-revolutionary manner at crucial periods in the country's life. The ideology conforming to the class position and the class policy of the bourgeoisie will help all and everyone to discard their last vestiges of faith in the "democratism" of the Cadets. And it will do good to discard them. They need to be discarded to enable us to make progress in regard to the really mass struggle for the democratisation of Russia. Mr. Struve wants a frankly counter-revolutionary liberalism. We want it, too, because this "frankness" of liberalism will best of all enlighten both the democratic peasantry and the socialist proletariat.
Reverting to the Duma session of February 27, it should be said that the only honest and proud word of a democrat came from a Social-Democrat.x Deputy Chkheidze took the floor and declared that the Social-Democratic group would vote against the Bill. He started to give the reasons, but after his first words: "Our diplomacy in the West has always been a bulwark of reaction and served the interests of . . ." the Chairman stopped the mouth of the workers' deputy. "The instructions allow a member to give his reasons for
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voting," muttered the Cadets. "Besides reasons there is such a thing as form," answered the bandit who calls himself Chairman of the Third Duma.
He was right from his point of view: who cares about instructions when the successful staging of the police-sponsored, patriotic demonstration was at stake.
The workers' deputy stood isolated on this question. This is all the more to his credit. The proletariat should show, and it will show, that it is capable of defending the behests of the democratic revolution despite all the treacheries of liberalism and the waverings of the petty bourgeoisie.