Lenin CW-Vol. 23.pdf - From Marx to Mao

FAREWELL LETTER TO SWISS WORKERS371lutionary proletariat, carry through the socialist revolution.To the Russian proletariat has fallen the great honourof beginning the series of revolutions which the imperialistwar has made an objective inevitability. But the idea thatthe Russian proletariat is the chosen revolutionary proletariatamong the workers of the world is absolutely alien tous. We know perfectly well that the proletariat of Russia isless organised, less prepared and less class-conscious thanthe proletariat of other countries. It is not its special qualities,but rather the special conjuncture of historical circumstancesthat for a certain, perhaps very short, time hasmade the proletariat of Russia the vanguard of the revolutionaryproletariat of the whole world.Russia is a peasant country, one of the most backwardof European countries. Socialism cannot triumph theredirectly and immediately. But the peasant character of thecountry, the vast reserve of land in the hands of the nobility,may, to judge from the experience of 1905, give tremendoussweep to the bourgeois-democratic revolution inRussia and may make our revolution the prologue to theworld socialist revolution, a step toward it.Our Party was formed and developed in the struggle forthese ideas, which have been fully confirmed by the experienceof 1905 and the spring of 1917, in the uncompromisingstruggle against all the other parties; and we shall continueto fight for these ideas.In Russia, socialism cannot triumph directly and immediately.But the peasant mass can bring the inevitableand matured agrarian upheaval to the point of confiscatingall the immense holdings of the nobility. This has alwaysbeen our slogan and it has now again been advanced in St.Petersburg by the Central Committee of our Party and byPravda, our Party’s newspaper. The proletariat will fightfor this slogan, without closing its eyes to the inevitabilityof cruel class conflicts between the agricultural labourersand the poorest peasants closely allied with them, on theone band, and the rich peasants, whose position has beenstrengthened by Stolypin’s agrarian “reform” (1907-14),on the other. The fact should not be overlooked that the 104peasant deputies in the First (1906) and Second (1907) Dumas