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

356V. I. LENINnicipalised lands in the Urals would remain the “property”of the people of the Urals. That would mean the creationof a new, reactionary, Cossack stratum—reactionary becauseprivileged small farmers having ten times more land thanall the rest of the farmers could not but resist the peasantrevolution, and could not but defend the privileges of privatelandownership. It only remains for us to assume thaton the basis of that same programme, the “democratic state”might declare the tens of millions of dessiatins of Uralforests to be “forests of national importance”, or “colonisationlands” (does not the Cadet Kaufman apply thatterm to the forest land in the Urals, within the 25 per centlimit, which means 21,000,000 dessiatins in the Vyatka,Ufa, and Perm gubernias?), and on that ground becometheir “owner”. Not flexibility, but confusion, pure andsimple, is the distinguishing feature of municipalisation.Now let us see what carrying out municipalisation inthe very process of the revolution means. Here we meetwith attacks on my “revolutionary peasant committees”as a class institution. “We are for non-class institutions,”the Mensheviks argued at Stockholm, playing at liberalism.Cheap liberalism! It did not occur to our Mensheviks thatin order to introduce local self-government of a non-classcharacter it is necessary to defeat the privileged class againstwhich the struggle is being waged and to wrest the powerfrom it. It is just “in the very process of the revolution”,as John puts it, i.e., in the course of the struggle to driveout the landlords, in the course of those “revolutionaryactions of the peasantry” that are mentioned also in theMensheviks’ resolution on-tactics, that peasant committeescan be set up. The introduction of local self-governmentof a non-class character is provided for in our politicalprogramme; it is bound to be established as the organisationof administration after the victory, when thewhole of the population will have been compelled to acceptthe new order. If the words of our programme about “supportingthe revolutionary actions of the peasantry, includingthe confiscation of the landlords’ lands” is not merephrase-mongering, then we must think about organisingthe masses for those “actions”! Yet that is entirely overlookedin the Menshevik programme. That programme is so