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

NOTES453171819The coup d’état of June 3, 1907 was carried out by the tsaristgovernment, which dissolved the Second Duma and published anew electoral law that reduced severalfold the already small representationof workers and peasants in the Duma. The law depriveda large part of the population of Asiatic Russia of electoral rightsand reduced by half the representation of the people of Poland andthe Caucasus. Black Hundreds and Octobrists predominated inthe Third Duma, which was elected on the basis of this law, andopened in November 1907. p. 24Milyukov, P. N.—leader of the Cadet Party.Stolypin, P. A.—a reactionary statesman of tsarist Russia anda big landlord, Chairman of the Council of Ministers and the Ministerof the Interior from 1906 to 1911. He headed the regime of savagepolitical reaction after the suppression of the 1905-07 Revolutionand organised bloody acts of repression against the revolutionaryworkers and peasants. p. 25Rech (Speech)—a daily newspaper, the central organ of the CadetParty, which was published in St. Petersburg from February 1906.It was closed down by the Revolutionary Military Committee ofthe Petrograd Soviet on October 26 (November 8), 1917. p. 2620Kutler, N. N.—a prominent leader of the Cadet Party. p. 26212223Vekhi—a Cadet collection of articles by N. Berdayev, S. Bulgakov,P. Struve, M. Herschensohn and other representatives of the counter-revolutionaryliberal bourgeoisie, published in Moscow in thespring of 1909. In articles on the Russian intelligentsia these writerstried to discredit the revolutionary-democratic traditions of thefinest representatives of the Russian people, including V. G. Belinskyand N. G. Chernyshevsky, vilified the revolutionary movementof 1905, and thanked the tsarist government for having, “with itsbayonets and jails”, saved the bourgeoisie from “the fury of thepeople”. The writers called upon the intelligentsia to serve theautocracy. Lenin compared the programme of Vekhi, as regardsboth philosophy and publicist matters, to that of the Black-Hundred newspaper Moskovskiye Vedomosti, and he called thesymposium an “encyclopaedia of liberal renegacy”, nothing but“a veritable torrent of reactionary mud poured on the head ofdemocracy” (see pp. 123-31 of this volume).p. 27The expression “His Majesty’s Opposition” was used by the leaderof the Cadet Party, P. Milyukov. In a speech at a luncheon givenby the Lord Mayor of London on June 19 (July 2), 1909, Milyukovdeclared: “So long as there is in Russia a legislative chamberwhich controls the budget, the Russian opposition will remain theopposition of His Majesty and not to His Majesty.” (Rech No. 167,June 21 [July 4], 1909). p. 27Trudoviks, Trudovik group—the group of petty-bourgeois democratsin the State Dumas, consisting of peasants and intellectuals of a