Collected Works of V. I. Lenin - Vol. 16 - From Marx to Mao

THE DEMONSTRATION ON THE DEATH OF MUROMTSEV315Hundred Duma such a demonstration afforded an opportunityto express openly and on a comparatively broad scalea protest against the autocracy. The tsarist autocracy wageda desperate struggle against the introduction of representativeinstitutions in Russia. The autocracy gerrymanderedand distorted the convocation of the first parliament in Russia,when the proletariat and revolutionary peasantry compelledit by mass struggle to convoke this assembly. Theautocracy cynically flouted and rode roughshod over democracyand the people, insofar as the voice of the people, thevoice of democracy, resounded in the First Duma. Now theautocracy is persecuting even the recollection of this feebleexpression of the demands of democracy in the First Duma(the expression of these demands was much feebler, poorer,narrower, less lively during the First Duma and from therostrum of the First Duma than in the autumn of 1905 fromthe rostrums which were created by the wave of open massstruggle).That is why democracy and liberalism could and had tocome together in a demonstration of protest against theautocracy on any occasion that put the masses in mind ofthe revolution. But, coming together in a common demonstration,they could not but express their attitude both to theappraisal of the aims of democracy in general and to the historyof the First Duma in particular. And the first approachto such an appraisal brought out the insufferable threadbareness,political impotence and political ineptitude of ourbourgeois liberalism.Just think: the Black-Hundred Duma has “today”, October15, 1910, “divorced itself finally and irrevocably” fromthe people! That is to say, hitherto it was not divorced fromthem irrevocably. That is to say, participation in honouringthe memory of Muromtsev would have remedied, could haveremedied the “divorcement” from “popular feeling”, i.e.,the divorcement of various of our counter-revolutionariesfrom democracy. Understand, gentlemen, you who lay claimto the lofty title of democrats, that you yourselves, morethan anyone else, are detracting from the significance ofthe demonstration, making it cheap, when you put the questionin such a light. “Even putting the lowest moral andpolitical value on the Third Duma,” says Rech, “it seemed