Collected Works of V. I. Lenin - Vol. 13 - From Marx to Mao

118V. I. LENINof 1907, they supported the government in the Second Duma.The revolution exposed the liberals very quickly and showedthem in their true counter-revolutionary colours.In this respect the period of constitutional hopes serveda very useful purpose as far as the people were concerned.The experience of the First and Second Dumas has notonly made them realise how utterly contemptible is therole that liberalism plays in our revolution. It has also,in actual fact, quashed the attempt at leadership of thedemocratic movement by a party which only political infantsor senile dotards can regard as being really constitutionally“democratic”.In 1905 and the beginning of 1906, the class compositionof the bourgeois democrats in Russia was not yet clear toeveryone. Hopes that the autocracy could be combined withactual representation of more or less broad masses of thepeople existed not only among the ignorant and downtroddeninhabitants of various out-of-the-way places. Suchhopes were not absent even in ruling spheres of the autocracy.Why did the electoral law in both the Bulygin andthe Witte Dumas grant a considerable degree of representationto the peasantry? Because belief in the monarchistsentiments of the countryside still persisted. “The muzhikwill help us out”—this exclamation of an official newspaperin the spring of 1906 expressed the government’s relianceon the conservatism of the peasant mass. In those days theCadets were not only not aware of the antagonism betweenthe democracy of the peasants and bourgeois liberalismbut even feared the backwardness of the peasants and desiredonly one thing—that the Duma should help to convertthe conservative or indifferent peasant into a liberal.In the spring of 1906, Mr. Struve expressed an ambitiouswish when he wrote, “the peasant in the Duma will be aCadet”. In the summer of 1907, the same Mr. Struve raisedthe banner of struggle against the Trudovik or Left partieswhich he regarded as the main obstacle to an agreementbetween bourgeois liberalism and the autocracy. In thecourse of eighteen months the slogan of a struggle for thepolitical enlightenment of the peasants was changed by theliberals to a slogan of struggle against a “too” politicallyeducated and demanding peasantry!