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

268V. I. LENINkept dinning into the peasants’ ears about the blessingsof peasant proprietorship. The actual alignment of forceson this question has been depicted by such a wealth of datathat there can be no doubt as to its correctness (from thestandpoint of class interests). The Cadet Party in the FirstDuma, when the liberals regarded the revolutionary peopleas a force and tried to woo them, was also swept along bythe general current in the direction of land nationalisation.As is known, the Cadet Land Bill introduced in the FirstDuma contained a clause about a “state land reserve” toinclude all alienated land and from which land would begranted on long-term leases. Of course, the Cadets in theFirst Duma did not put that demand forward on anygrounds of principle—it would be ridiculous to speak of theCadet Party having principles. No. That demand of theliberals sprang up as a feeble echo of the demands of thepeasant masses. Already in the First Duma the peasantdeputies at once began to form a separate political group,and the Land Bill of the “104” served as the chief and basicplatform of the whole of the Russian peasantry, which cameforward as a conscious social force. The speeches of thepeasant deputies in the First and Second Dumas and thearticles in the Trudovik papers (Izvestia KrestyanskikhDeputatov, Trudovaya Rossiya) showed that the Bill of the104 faithfully expressed the interests and hopes of the peasants.That Bill must, therefore, be dealt with in somewhatgreater detail.It is interesting, by the way, to look at the compositionof the group of deputies who signed the Bill. In the FirstDuma it was signed by 70 Trudoviks, 17 non-party deputies,8 peasants who supplied no information as to their partyaffiliation, 5 Cadets,* 3 Social-Democrats,** and 1 LithuanianAutonomist. In the Second Duma the Bill of the“104” had 99 signatures, and after deducting duplicates, 91signatures, namely, 79 Trudoviks, 4 Popular Socialists,2 Socialist-Revolutionaries, 2 deputies from the Cossack* G. Zubchenko, T. Volkov, M. Gerasimov, all peasants;S. Lozhkin, a physician, and Afanasyev, a priest.** Antonov, a worker from Perm Gubernia, Yershov, a workerfrom Kazan Gubernia, and V. Churyukov, a worker from MoscowGubernia.