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

REVOLUTION AND COUNTER-REVOLUTION119This change of slogans expresses as plainly as can bethe complete bankruptcy of liberalism in the Russian revolution.The class antagonism between the mass of thedemocratic rural population and the semi-feudal landlordsproved to be immeasurably deeper than the cowardly anddull-witted Cadets imagined. That is why their attemptto take the lead in the struggle for democracy failed soquickly and irrevocably. That is why their whole “line”aimed at reconciling the petty-bourgeois democratic massof the people with the Octobrist and Black-Hundred landlordswas a fiasco. A great, though negative, gain of thecounter-revolutionary period of the two Dumas was thisbankruptcy of the treacherous “champions” of the “people’sfreedom”. The class struggle going on below threw theseheroes of ministerial ante-rooms overboard, turned themfrom claimants to leadership into ordinary lackeys of Octobrismslightly touched up with constitutional varnish.He who still fails to see this bankruptcy of the liberals,who have undergone a practical test of their worth as championsof democracy, or at least as fighters in the democraticranks, has understood absolutely nothing of the politicalhistory of the two Dumas. Among these people the meaninglessreiteration of a memorised formula about supportingbourgeois democracy becomes counter-revolutionarysnivelling. The Social-Democrats should have no regrets atthe shattering of constitutional illusions. They shouldsay what Marx said about counter-revolution in Germany:the people gained by the loss of its illusions. 69 Bourgeoisdemocracy in Russia gained by the loss of worthless leadersand weak-kneed allies. So much the better for the politicaldevelopment of this democracy.It remains for the party of the proletariat to see to itthat the valuable political lessons of our revolution andcounter-revolution should be more deeply pondered overand more firmly grasped by the broad masses. The periodof onslaught on the autocracy saw the deployment of theforces of the proletariat and taught it the fundamentals ofrevolutionary tactics; it showed the conditions for thesuccess of the direct struggle of the masses, which alone wasable to achieve improvements of any importance. The longperiod during which the proletarian forces were prepared,