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

AGRARIAN PROGRAMME OF SOCIAL-DEMOCRACY333Local self-government that is at all really democraticis impossible unless landlord rule is completely overthrownand landlordism is abolished. While admitting this inwords, the Mensheviks, with amazing light-mindedness,refuse to consider what it implies in deeds. In deeds, itcannot be attained unless the revolutionary classes conquerpolitical power throughout the state; and one would havethought that two years of revolution would have taughteven the most obdurate “man in the muffler” that theseclasses in Russia can only be the proletariat and the peasantry.To be victorious, the “peasant agrarian revolution”of which you gentlemen speak must, as such, as a peasantrevolution, become the central authority throughout thestate.The democratic self-governing bodies can be only particlesof such a central authority of the democratic peasantry.Only by combating the local and regional disunityof the peasantry, only by advocating, preparing, and organisinga nation-wide, all-Russian, centralised movement,can real service be rendered to the cause of “peasant agrarianrevolution”, and not to the encouragement of parochialbackwardness and local provincial stupefaction ofthe peasantry. It is precisely this stupefaction that you, Mr.Plekhanov and Mr. John, are serving when you advocatethe preposterous and arch-reactionary idea that local selfgovernmentcan become a “bulwark against reaction”, orthat it can “consolidate the gains of the revolution”. Forthe experience of the two years of the Russian revolutionhas plainly demonstrated that it was precisely this localand regional disunity of the peasant movement (the soldiers!movement is part of the peasant movement) that was mostof all responsible for the defeat.To present a programme of a “peasant agrarian revolutionand associate it only with the democratisation of localself-government and not of the central government, to holdthe former up as a genuine “bulwark” and “consolidation”,is in reality nothing but a Cadet deal with reaction.* The* I have dealt more fully with this in the Report. (See presentedition, Vol. 10, pp. 337-38.—Ed.) Here I shall add an extract from aspeech by the Menshevik Novosedsky, which I did not hear (see theReport) at the Congress, but which corroborates this most strikingly.