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

26V. I. LENINmutiny of the Potemkin. In the sphere of the press, the unions,and education the legal bounds prescribed by the oldregime were everywhere systematically broken, and by nomeans by the “revolutionaries” alone, but by the man-inthe-street,for the old authority was really weakened, wasreally letting the reins slip from its senile hands. A singularlystriking and unerring indication of the force of theupswing (from the point of view of the revolutionary organisations)was the fact that the slogans of the revolutionariesnot only evoked a response but actually laggedbehind the march of events. January 9 and the mass strikesthat followed it, and the Potemkin were all events whichwere in advance of the direct appeals of the revolutionaries.In 1905, there was no appeal of theirs which the masseswould have met passively, by silence, or by abandoningthe struggle. The boycott under such conditions was a naturalsupplement to the electrically charged atmosphere.That slogan did not “invent” anything at the time, it merelyformulated accurately and truly the upswing which wasgoing steadily forward towards a direct assault. On the contrary,the “inventors” were our Mensheviks, who kept alooffrom the revolutionary upswing, fell for the empty promiseof the tsar in the shape of the manifesto or the law of August 6and seriously believed in the promised change over to aconstitutional monarchy. The Mensheviks (and Parvus)at that time based their tactics not on the fact of the sweeping,powerful, and rapid revolutionary upswing, but onthe tsar’s promise of a change to a constitutional monarchy!No wonder such tactics turned out to be ridiculous andabject opportunism. No wonder that in all the Menshevikarguments about the boycott an analysis of the boycott ofthe Bulygin Duma, i.e., the revolution’s greatest experienceof the boycott, is now carefully discarded. But it is notenough to recognise this mistake of the Mensheviks, perhapstheir biggest mistake in revolutionary tactics. Onemust clearly realise that the source of this mistake wasfailure to understand the objective state of affairs, whichmade the revolutionary upswing a reality and the changeto a constitutional monarchy an empty police promise.The Mensheviks were wrong not because they approachedthe question in a mood devoid of subjective revolutionary