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

36V. I. LENINare talking about. They do not understand that taking accountof the experience of the revolution includes defendingthe ideals and aims and methods of the revolution from insidethe Duma. If we do not know how to defend these ideals,aims and methods from inside the Duma, through our working-classParty members who might enter and those who havealready entered this Duma, it means that we are unable tomake the first step towards politically taking account ofthe experience of the revolution (for what we are concernedwith here is of course not a theoretical summing up of experiencein books and researches). Our task is by no meansended by this first step. Incomparably more important thanthe first step will be the second and third steps, i.e., theconversion of the experience already gained by the massesinto ideological stock-in-trade for new historic action. Butif these otzovist windbags themselves speak of an “interrevolutionary”period they should have understood (if theywere able to think and reason things out in a Social-Democraticway) that “inter-revolutionary” signifies preciselythat elementary, preliminary tasks come on the order of theday. “Inter-revolutionary” denotes an unsettled, indefinitesituation when the old regime has become convinced thatit is impossible to rule with the old instruments alone andtries to use a new instrument within the general frameworkof the old institutions. This is an internally contradictory,futile attempt, in which the autocracy is once more goingtowards inevitable failure, is once more leading us to arepetition of the glorious period and glorious battles of 1905.But it is going not in the same way as in 1897-1903, it isleading the people to revolution not in the same way asbefore 1905. It is this “not in the same way” that we mustbe able to understand; we must be able to modify our tactics,supplementing all the basic, general, primary and cardinaltasks of revolutionary Social-Democracy by one more task,not very ambitious, but a specific task of the present newperiod: the task of utilising the Black-Hundred Duma ina revolutionary Social-Democratic way.Like any new task it seems more difficult than the others,because it requires of people not a simple repetition of sloganslearned by heart (beyond which Maximov and the otzovistsare mentally bankrupt), but a certain amount of initia-