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

20V. I. LENINfor the immediate development of the revolution, a choicethat was to be determined, of course, not by the will ofone or another group, but by the relative strength of therevolutionary and counter-revolutionary classes. And thisstrength could only be gauged and tested in the struggle.The slogan of boycotting the Bulygin Duma was, therefore,a slogan of the struggle for the path of direct revolutionarystruggle and against the constitutional-monarchistpath. Even on the latter path, of course, a strugglewas possible, and not only possible but inevitable. Evenon the basis of a monarchist constitution it was possibleto continue the revolution and prepare for its new upswing;even on the basis of a monarchist constitution it was possibleand obligatory for the Social-Democrats to carry onthe struggle. This truism, which Axelrod and Plekhanovtried so hard and irrelevantly to prove in 1905, remainstrue. But the issue raised by history was a different one:Axelrod and Plekhanov were arguing “beside the point”,or in other words, they side-stepped the issue which eventsput to the conflicting forces by introducing a questiontaken from the latest edition of the German Social-Democratictextbook. The impending struggle for the choice ofa path of struggle was historically inevitable in the immediatefuture. The alternatives were these: was the oldauthority to convene Russia’s first representative institutionand thereby for a time (perhaps a very brief, perhapsa fairly long time) switch the revolution to the monarchistconstitutionalpath, or were the people by a direct assaultto sweep away—at the worst, to shake—the old regime,prevent it from switching the revolution to the monarchistconstitutionalpath and guarantee (also for a more or lesslengthy period) the path of direct revolutionary struggleof the masses? That was the issue historically confrontingthe revolutionary classes of Russia in the autumn of 1905which Axelrod and Plekhanov at the time failed to notice.The Social-Democrats’ advocacy of active boycott wasitself a way of raising the issue, a way of consciously raisingit by the party of the proletariat, a slogan of the strugglefor the choice of a path of struggle.The advocates of active boycott, the Bolsheviks, correctlyinterpreted the question objectively posed by his-