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

AGRARIAN PROGRAMME OF SOCIAL-DEMOCRACY353The Bolsheviks, on the other hand, ever since the beginningof the revolution in the spring and summer of 1905,when the confusion of Bolshevism with boycottism, boyevism,etc., that is now so prevalent among the ignorantor stupid, was still out of the question, clearly pointed tothe source of our tactical differences by singling out the conceptof peasant revolution as one of the varieties of bourgeoisrevolution, and by defining the victory of the peasantrevolution as “the revolutionary-democratic dictatorshipof the proletariat and the peasantry”. Since then Bolshevismwon its greatest ideological victory in internationalSocial-Democracy with the publication of Kautsky’s articleon the driving forces of the Russian revolution (“TheDriving Forces and Prospects of the Russian Revolution”,Russian translation edited and with a preface by N. Lenin,published by Novaya Epokha Publishers, Moscow, 1907).As is known, at the beginning of the split between the Bolsheviksand the Mensheviks in 1903, Kautsky sided with thelatter. In 1907, having watched the course of the Russianrevolution, on the subject of which he wrote repeatedly,he at once saw the mistake made by Plekhanov, who hadsent him his famous questionnaire. In that questionnaire,Plekhanov inquired only about the bourgeois nature of theRussian revolution, without specifying the concept of peasantbourgeois revolution, without going beyond generalformulas such as “bourgeois democracy”, “bourgeois oppositionparties”. In answering Plekhanov Kautsky rectifiedthat mistake by pointing out that the bourgeoisie was notthe driving force of the Russian revolution, that in thatsense the days of bourgeois revolutions had passed, that “alasting community of interests during the whole period ofthe revolutionary struggle exists only between the proletariatand the peasantry” (op. cit., pp. 30-31), and that “it[this lasting community of interests] should be made thebasis of the whole of the revolutionary tactics of RussianSocial-Democracy” (ibid., p. 31). The underlying principlesof Bolshevik tactics as against those of the Mensheviks arehere clearly expressed. Plekhanov is terribly angry aboutthis in his New Letters, etc. But his annoyance only makesthe impotence of his argument more obvious. The crisisthrough which we are passing is “a bourgeois crisis for all