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

30V. I. LENINarchist) constitutionalism and the period of oppressionand suppression of popular freedom by means of the monarchist“constitution”.Now the period of constitutional illusions, the periodof the First and Second Dumas is quite clear to us, andit is no longer difficult to grasp the importance of the fightwhich the revolutionary Social-Democrats waged at thattime against constitutional illusions. But at that time,in 1905 and the beginning of 1906, neither the liberals inthe bourgeois camp nor the Mensheviks in the proletariancamp understood this.Yet the period of the First and Second Dumas was inevery sense and all respects a period of constitutionalillusions. The solemn pledge that “no law shall becomeeffective without the approval of the Duma” was not violatedat that period. Thus, the constitution existed onpaper, never ceasing to warm the cockles of all the slavishhearts of the Russian Cadets. 13 Both Dubasov and Stolypinat that period put the Russian constitution to the test ofpractice, tried it and verified it in an effort to adjust andfit it to the old autocracy. They, Dubasov and Stolypin,appeared to be the most powerful men of the time, andthey worked hard to make the “illusion” a reality. Theillusion proved to be an illusion. History has fully endorsedthe correctness of the slogan of the revolutionary Social-Democrats. But it was not only the Dubasovs and Stolypinswho tried to put the “constitution” into effect, it was notonly the servile Cadets who praised it to the skies andlike flunkeys (à la Mr. Rodichev in the First Duma) exertedthemselves to prove that the monarch was blameless andthat it would be presumptuous to hold him responsible forthe pogroms. No. During this period the broad masses ofthe people as well undoubtedly still believed to a greateror lesser extent in the “constitution”, believed in the Dumadespite the warnings of the Social-Democrats.The period of constitutional illusions in the Russianrevolution may be said to have been a period of nationwideinfatuation with a bourgeois fetish, just as whole nationsin Western Europe sometimes become infatuatedwith the fetish of bourgeois nationalism, anti-semitism,chauvinism, etc. It is to the credit of the Social-Democrats