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

360V. I. LENINsame amount, the result can be nothing except bondage, abjectpoverty, ruin and stagnation of the whole national economy.Hence the Social-Democratic Labour Party calledon the peasants to take up the revolutionary struggle. Bytheir mass strikes in 1905 the workers throughout Russiarallied the peasants and directed their struggle. The liberalplan to “reconcile” the peasants with the landlords through“redemption payments at a fair valuation” 134 was an empty,miserable, treacherous trick.How does the Stolypin government want to refashion theold order in the countryside? It wants to speed up the completeruin of the peasants, to preserve the landed estates,to help an insignificant handful of rich peasants to set upfarmsteads and grab as much as possible of the land of thevillage communes. The government has realised that thepeasant masses are against it and it is trying to find alliesamong the rich peasants.Stolypin himself once said that “twenty years of tranquillity”would be needed to carry out the “reform” proposedby the government. By “tranquillity” he means submissivenesson the part of the peasants, the absence of any struggleagainst violence. Yet without violence committed by therural superintendents and other authorities, violence atevery step, violence against tens of millions—without suppressingthe slightest signs of independence on the partof these millions, the Stolypin “reform” cannot be carriedout. Not even for three years, let alone twenty, has Stolypinbeen able to bring about “tranquillity”, nor will he beable to do so; this is the unpleasant truth of which the tsar’slackeys have been reminded by the ex-minister’s book aboutfires in the countryside.The peasants do not and-cannot have any other way outof the position of desperate want, poverty, and death by starvationinto which the government has plunged them than bymass struggle together with the proletariat to overthrow thetsarist regime. Preparation of the forces of the proletariatfor this struggle, the creation, development and consolidationof proletarian organisations—this is the immediate taskof the R.S.D.L.P.Rabochaya Gazeta No. 2,December 18 (31), 1910Published according tothe text in Rabochaya Gazeta