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

AGAINST BOYCOTT21tory. The October-December struggle of 1905 was reallya struggle for the choice of a path of struggle. This strugglewas waged with varying fortune: at first the revolutionarypeople got the upper hand, wrested from the old regime achance to immediately switch the revolution on to monarchist-constitutionallines and set up representative institutionsof a purely revolutionary type—Soviets of Workers’Deputies, etc., in place of the representative institutionsof the police-liberal type. The October-December periodwas one of maximum freedom, maximum independentactivity of the masses, maximum breadth and momentumof the workers’ movement on ground cleared of monarchist-constitutionalinstitutions, laws and snags by theassault of the people, on a ground of “interregnum”, whenthe old authority was already undermined, and the newrevolutionary power of the people (the Soviets of Workers’,Peasants’, and Soldiers’ Deputies, etc.) was not yet strongenough to completely replace it. The December struggledecided the question in a different direction: the old regimewon by repulsing the assault of the people and holdingits positions. But, of course, at that time there were nogrounds as yet for considering this a decisive victory. TheDecember uprising of 1905 had its continuation in a numberof sporadic and partial mutinies and strikes in the summerof 1906. The slogan of boycott of the Witte Duma 8 was aslogan of struggle for the concentration and generalisationof these uprisings.Thus, the first conclusion to be drawn from an analysisof the experience of the Russian revolution in boycottingthe Bulygin Duma is that, in the objective guise of theboycott, history placed on the order of the day a strugglefor the form of the immediate path of development, astruggle over whether the old authority or the new selfestablishedpeople’s power would be called upon to conveneRussia’s first representative assembly, a strugglefor a directly revolutionary path or (for a time) for the pathof a monarchist constitution.In this connection there arises a question, which hasoften cropped up in the literature, and which constantlycrops up when this subject is discussed, namely, that ofthe simplicity, clarity, and “directness” of the boycott