Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution

(Draft Platform for the Proletarian Party)

The moment of history through which Russia is now passing is marked by the following main characteristics:

THE CLASS CHARACTER OF THE REVOLUTLON THAT HAS TAKEN PLACE

1. The old tsarist power, which represented only a handful of feudalist landowners who commanded the entire state machinery (the army, the police, and the bureaucracy), has been overthrown and removed, but not completely destroyed. The monarchy has not been formally abolished; the Romanov gang continues to hatch monarchist intrigues. The vast landed possessions of the feudalist squirearchy have not been abolished.

2. State power in Russia has passed into the hands of a new class, namely, the bourgeoisie and landowners who had become bourgeois. To this extent the bourgeois-democratic revolution in Russia is completed.

Having come to power, the bourgeoisie has formed a bloc (an alliance) with the overt monarchists, who are notorious for their exceptionally ardent support of Nicholas the Bloody and Stolypin the Hangman in 1906-14 (Guchkov and other politicians to the right of the Cadets^[1]). The new bourgeois government of Lvov and Co. has attempted and has begun to negotiate with the Romanovs for the restoration of the monarchy in Russia. Behind a screen of revolutionary phrases, this government is appointing partisans of the old regime to key positions. It is striving to reform the whole machinery of state (the army, the police, and the bureaucracy) as little as possible, and has turned it over to the bourgeoisie. The new government has already begun to hinder in every way the revolutionary initiative of mass action and the seizure of power by the people from below, which is the sole guarantee of the real success of the revolution.

Up to now this government has not even fixed a date for the convocation of the Constituent Assembly. It is not laying a finger on the landed estates, which form the material foundation of feudal tsarism. This government does not even contemplate starting an investigation into, and making public, the activities of the monopolist financial organisations, the big banks, the syndicates and cartels of the capitalists, etc., or instituting control over them.

The key positions, the decisive ministerial posts in the new government (the Ministry of the Interior and the War Ministry, i.e., the command over the army, the police, the bureaucracy –the entire apparatus for oppressing the people) are held by outright monarchists and supporters of the system of big landed estates. The Cadets, those day-old republicans, republicans against their own will, have been assigned minor posts, having no direct relation to the command over the people or to the apparatus of state power. A. Kerensky, a Trudovik^[2] and “would-be socialist”, has no function whatsoever, except to lull the vigilance and attention of the people with sonorous phrases.

For all these reasons, the new bourgeois government does not deserve the confidence of the proletariat even in the sphere of internal policy, and no support of this government by the proletariat is admissible.

Notes

[1] Cadets—(abbreviated) members of the Constitutional-Democratic Party, the chief party of the liberal monarchist bourgeoisie in Russia. Founded in October 1905, its membership was made up of representatives of the bourgeoisie, Zemstvo leaders of the landowning class and bourgeois intellectuals. Among the leading personalities of the party were P. N. Milyukov, S. A. Muromtsev, V. A. Maklakov, A. I. Shingaryov, P. B. Struve and F. I. Rodichev. Eventually, the Cadets became a party of the imperialist bourgeoisie. During the First World War they fully supported the tsarist government’s aggressive foreign policy. During the bourgeois-democratic revolution of February 1917 they tried their hardest to save the monarchy. They used their key positions in the bourgeois Provisional Government to pursue a counter-revolutionary policy opposed to the interests of the people, but favouring the U.S., British and French imperialists. After the victory of the October Revolution the Cadets came out as implacable enemies of the Soviet power. They took part in all the counter-revolutionary armed actions and campaigns of the interventionists. Living abroad as émigrés after the defeat of the interventionists and whiteguards, the Cadets did not cease their anti-Soviet counter-revolutionary activities.

[2] Trudoviks (the Trudovik group)—a group of petty-bourgeois democrats in the Russian Duma consisting of peasants and intellectuals of a Narodnik trend. The Trudovik group was formed in April 1906 by peasant deputies to the First Duma. In the Duma the Trudoviks vacillated between the Cadets and the revolutionary Social-Democrats. During the First World War most of the Trudoviks took a social-chauvinist stand.

After the bourgeois-democratic revolution of February 1917 the Trudoviks, representing the interests of the kulaks, actively supported the Provisional Government. The Trudovik Zarudny, who became Minister of Justice after the July events, persecuted the Bolshevik Party. The Trudoviks were enemies of the October Revolution and sided with the bourgeois counter-revolution.