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

AGRARIAN PROGRAMME OF SOCIAL-DEMOCRACY349division) with political “pessimism” (Novosedsky’s democratisation“of a comparative degree” at the centre).The Mensheviks, as if in spite of themselves, accept thepeasant revolution, but do not want to give the people aclear and definite picture of it. One can detect in whatthey say the opinion expressed with such inimitable naïvetéby the Menshevik Ptitsyn at Stockholm: “The revolutionaryturmoil will pass away, bourgeois life will resume itsusual course, and unless a workers’ revolution takes placein the West, the bourgeoisie will inevitably come to powerin our country. Comrade Lenin will not and cannot denythat” (Minutes, p. 91). Thus, a superficial, abstract conceptionof the bourgeois revolution has obscured the questionof one of its varieties, namely, the peasant revolution!All of this last is mere “turmoil”, and the only thing thatis real is the “usual course”. The philistine point of viewand failure to understand what the struggle is about in ourbourgeois revolution could hardly be expressed in clearerterms.The peasantry cannot carry out an agrarian revolutionwithout abolishing the old regime, the standing army andthe bureaucracy, because all these are the most reliablemainstays of landlordism, bound to it by thousands of ties.That is why the idea of achieving a peasant revolution bydemocratising only the local institutions without completelybreaking up the central institutions is scientificallyunsound. In practice it is reactionary because it playsinto the hands of petty-bourgeois obtuseness and pettybourgeoisopportunism, which sees the thing in a very“simple” way: we want the land; as to politics, God willtake care of that! The peasant agrees that all the land mustbe taken; but whether all political power has to be takenas well, whether all political power can be taken, and howit should be taken, are things he does not bother about(or did not bother until the dissolution of two Dumas madehim wiser). Hence, the extremely reactionary standpointof the “peasant Cadet” Mr. Peshekhonov, who already inhis Agrarian Problem wrote: “Just now it is far more necessaryto give a definite answer on the agrarian questionthan, for instance, of the question of a republic” (p. 114).