NOTES
[40]
This refers to the unification of Germany which the German ruling classes undertook "from above" by means of the policy of "blood and iron", and through diplomatic intrigue and wars. The Prusso-Austrian war of 1866 resulted in the formation of the North-German Union, and the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71 led to the formation of the German Reich.
[p. 45]
[41]
Svet (Light ) -- a bourgeois nationalist daily published in St. Petersburg from 1882 to 1917.
Golos Moskvy (Voice of Moscow ) -- a daily newspaper published by the Octobrist Party, a counter-revolutionary party of the big industrial bourgeoisie and big landlords. It was published in Moscow from 1906 to 1915.
[p. 47]
[42]
Council of the United Nobility -- a counter-revolutionary organisation of the feudal landlords founded in May 1906 at the first congress of the delegates of the gubernia societies of the nobility. It functioned till October 1917. Its main objective was to defend the autocratic system, the big landed estates and the privileges of the nobility. The Council was headed by Count A. A. Bobrinsky, Prince N. F. Kasatkin-Rostovsky, Count D. A. Olsufyev, V. M. Purishkevich and others. Lenin called it the "council of united serf-owners".
The Council virtually became a semi-governmental agency which dictated to the government legislation designed to uphold the interests of the feudal landlords. A considerable number of its members were also members of the Council of State and the leading centres of Black-Hundred organisations.
[p. 47]
[43]
This refers to the tsar's Manifesto of June 3 (16), 1907, dissolving the Second Duma and amending the electoral law. The new law greatly increased the proportion of members of the Duma representing the landlords and the commercial and industrial bourgeoisie, while reducing several times over the proportion of peasant and workers' deputies, already small. It was a gross violation of the Manifesto of October 17 (30), 1905, and the Fundamental Law of 1906, under which all legislation introduced by the government was subject to approval by the Duma.
The new Regulations entitled the landowner curia to elect one elector for every 230 persons, the first urban curia one for every 1,000 and the second urban curia for 15,000, the peasant curia for every 60,000 and the worker curia for 125,000. The landlords and the bourgeoisie elected 65 per cent of the electors, the peasants 22 per cent (instead of the former 42) and the workers 2 per cent (as against 4 per cent in the past). The law disfranchised the indigenous population of Asian Russia and the Turkic peoples of the Astrakhan and Stavropol gubernias, and cut by half the proportion of representatives of the population of Poland and the Caucasus. All those who did not speak Russian were disfranchised throughout Russia. The Third Duma elected under this law was
page 614
convened on November 1 (14), 1907. It was Black-Hundred and Octobrist in composition.
The June Third coup d'état ushered in the period of Stolypin reaction.
[p. 47]
[44]
The Council of State -- one of the supreme organs of state government in pre-revolutionary Russia, established in 1810 -- according to a draft submitted by M. M. Speransky -- as an advisory legislative body whose members were appointed by the tsar. Under the law of February 20 (March 5), 1906, it was reorganised and authorised to approve or reject Bills after they had been discussed in the Duma. Nevertheless, the tsar retained the right to amend fundamental legislation and issue certain laws of special importance.
From 1906, one half of the Council members were elected representatives of the nobility, clergy and big bourgeoisie and the other half were dignitaries appointed by the tsar. Hence it was an extremely reactionary assembly which rejected even moderate Bills passed by the Duma.
[p. 48]
[45]
Zemstvos -- so-called local self-government bodies dominated by the nobility. They were set up in the central gubernias of tsarist Russia in 1864. Their jurisdiction was restricted to purely local economic and welfare matters -- hospital and road building, statistics, insurance, etc. They functioned under the control of the provincial governors and the Minister of the Interior, who could suspend decisions that did not suit the government.
[p. 49]
[46]
Lenin is referring to the speech which P. N. Milyukov made at the luncheon given by the Lord Mayor of the City of London in June 1909, during the visit of a delegation from the Third Duma and the Council of State. Milyukov reaffirmed the Cadets' allegiance to the tsarist autocracy and stressed that as long as Russia had a Duma "the Russian opposition would remain an opposition of, not to, His Majesty".
[p. 51]
[47]
Lenin is referring to the decree of November 9 (22), 1906, on "Additions to Certain Regulations of the Existing Law on Peasant Land Ownership and Land Tenure", drafted by Stolypin and named the law of June 14, 1910, upon its enactment by the Duma and the Council of State. On November 15 (28), 1906, another decree was issued -- "On the Granting of Loans by the Peasant Land Bank on the Security of Allotment Lands". The two decrees granted the peasants the right to take over their allotments as personal property and the right to withdraw from the village commune and settle on otrubs or khutors. Khutor and otrub peasants could obtain subsidies through the Peasant Bank to buy land. The Stolypin agrarian legislation aimed at making the kulaks the new social mainstay of the autocracy in the countryside while preserving the landed estates and forcibly destroying the village communes.
The Stolypin agrarian policy speeded up the capitalist evolution of agriculture in the extremely painful "Prussian" way, with the feudal landlords retaining their power, property and privileges.
page 615
It intensified the forcible expropriation of the bulk of the peasantry and accelerated the development of the peasant bourgeoisie, whom it enabled to buy up the allotments of the peasant poor at a nominal price.
Lenin described the Stolypin agrarian legislation of 1906 (and the law enacted on June 14 [27], 1910) as the second step, after the 1861 Reform, towards transforming the feudal autocracy into a bourgeois monarchy.
Although the government vigorously advocated the withdrawal of peasants from the village communes, only some 2,500,000 peasant households withdrew from them in European Russia over nine years (1907-15). The right to secede from the village commune was used above all by the rural bourgeoisie, which was thus enabled to strenethen its farms. Some of the poor peasants who wanted to sell their allotments and end their connection with the countryside seceded too. The small peasants, crushed by want, remained poverty-stricken and backward.
The Stolypin agrarian policy did not remove the main contra diction between the peasantry as a whole and the landlord class. Moreover, it brought further ruin to the mass of the peasantry and aggravated the class antagonisms between the kulaks and the peasant poor.
[p. 53]
[47a]
The Polish Kolo (Circle ) was an association of Polish deputies to the Duma. In the First and Second Dumas, its leading core was composed of National-Democrats, members of the reactionary, nationalist party of the Polish landlords and bourgeoisie. The Kolo backed the Octobrists on all major tactical issues.
[p. 55]