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

260V. I. LENINby Comrade John! To become convinced of this, it is sufficientto glance at the Minutes of the Stockholm Congress.That argument was directly and categorically advancedby Comrade John in his report. “If the revolution,” he said,“were to lead to an attempt to nationalise the peasants’allotments, or to nationalise the lands confiscated from thelandlords, as Comrade Lenin suggests, such a measurewould lead to a counter-revolutionary movement, not onlyin the borderlands, but also in the central part of the country.We would have not one Vendée, 103 but a generalrevolt of the peasantry against attempts by the state tointerfere with the peasants’ own [John’s italics] allotments,against attempts to nationalise the latter.” (Minutes of theStockholm Congress, p. 40.)That seems clear, does it not? The nationalisation ofthe peasants’ own lands would lead to a general revolt ofthe peasantry! That is the reason why Comrade X’s originalmunicipalisation scheme, which had proposed totransfer to the Zemstvos not only the private lands, but“if possible” all the lands (quoted by me in the pamphletRevision of the Agrarian Programme of the Workers’ Party*),was replaced by Maslov’s municipalisation scheme, whichproposed to exempt the peasants’ lands. Indeed, how couldthey ignore the fact, discovered after 1903, about the inevitablepeasant revolt against attempts at complete nationalisation?How could they refrain from adopting the standpointof another noted Menshevik, Kostrov, 104 who exclaimedin Stockholm:“To go to the peasants with it [nationalisation] meansantagonising them. The peasant movement will go on apartfrom or against us, and we shall find ourselves thrown overboardin the revolution. Nationalisation deprives Social-Democracy of its strength, isolates it from the peasantryand thus also deprives the revolution of its strength” (p. 88).One cannot deny the force of that argument. To try tonationalise the peasants’ own land against their wishes ina peasant agrarian revolution! Since the Stockholm Congressbelieved John and Kostrov, it is not surprising that it rejectedthat idea.* See present edition, Vol. 10, p. 172.—Ed.