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

356V. I. LENINBut no victories of the reaction, however complete, notriumph of counter-revolution can destroy the enemies of thetsarist autocracy, the enemies of oppression by the landlordsand capitalists, because these enemies are the millions ofworkers who are being massed in ever-greater numbers inthe towns, in the big factories and on the railways. Theseenemies are the ruined peasantry whose life is many timesharder now that the rural superintendents and rich peasantshave united for legalised plunder, for the appropriation ofthe peasants’ land with the sanction of the landlords’ Duma,under the protection of all the landlord and military authorities.Enemies like the working class and the poor peasantrycannot be destroyed.And now, after three years of the most wanton riot ofcounter-revolution, we see that the mass of the people, thosemost oppressed, downtrodden, benighted, intimidated bypersecutions in every form, are beginning to raise their headsagain, to reawaken and resume the struggle. Three years ofexecutions, persecutions and savage reprisals have destroyedtens of thousands of the “enemies” of the autocracy, hundredsof thousands have been imprisoned or exiled, many hundredsof thousands more have been intimidated. But millionsand tens of millions of people are no longer what they werebefore the revolution. Never yet in the history of Russia havethese millions experienced such instructive and vivid lessons,such open class struggle. That a new and profound underlyingferment has set in among these millions and tens of millionsis evident from this summer’s strikes and the recentdemonstrations.Workers’ strikes in Russia both during the period of thepreparation of the revolution and during the revolutionitself were the most widely used means of struggle of theproletariat, of this advanced class, which is the only consistentlyrevolutionary class in modern society. Economicand political strikes, now alternating, now inseparablyinterwoven, united the mass of the workers against the capitalistclass and the autocratic government, threw the wholeof society into a ferment, and roused the peasantry for thestruggle.When a continuous wave of mass strikes began in 1895this was the beginning of the phase of preparation for the