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

324V. I. LENINfeelings of protest and anger. Belonging, as he did, primarilyto the era of 1861-1904, Tolstoy in his works—both as anartist and as a thinker and preacher—embodied in amazinglybold relief the specific historical features of the entire firstRussian revolution, its strength and its weakness.One of the principal distinguishing features of our revolutionis that it was a peasant bourgeois revolution in the eraof the very advanced development of capitalism throughoutthe world and of its comparatively advanced developmentin Russia. It was a bourgeois revolution because its immediateaim was to overthrow the tsarist autocracy, the tsaristmonarchy, and to abolish landlordism, but not to overthrowthe domination of the bourgeoisie. The peasantry in particularwas not aware of the latter aim, it was not aware of thedistinction between this aim and the closer and more immediateaims of the struggle. It was a peasant bourgeois revolutionbecause the objective conditions put in the forefrontthe problem of changing the basic conditions of life for thepeasantry, of breaking up the old, medieval system of landownership,of “clearing the ground” for capitalism; the objectiveconditions were responsible for the appearance of thepeasant masses on the arena of more or less independent historicaction.Tolstoy’s works express both the strength and the weakness,the might and the limitations, precisely of the peasantmass movement. His heated, passionate, and often ruthlesslysharp protest against the state and the official church thatwas in alliance with the police conveys the sentiments ofthe primitive peasant democratic masses, among whom centuriesof serfdom of official tyranny and robbery, and ofchurch Jesuitism, deception and chicanery had piled upmountains of anger and hatred. His unbending oppositionto private property in land conveys the psychology of thepeasant masses during that historical period in which theold, medieval landownership, both in the form of landedestates and in the form of state “allotments”, definitelybecame an intolerable obstacle to the further developmentof the country, and when this old landownership was inevitablybound to be destroyed most summarily and ruthlessly.His unremitting accusations against capitalism—accusationspermeated with most profound emotion and most