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

372V. I. LENINput the question in exactly the same way. “The astonishingthing about the Bill of the 42,” he said concerning the Billthat the Cadets introduced in the First Duma, “is that itbears the impress of the same old bureaucratic despotismwhich seeks to put everything on an equal level” (12th session,May 19, 1906, pp. 479-80). He, quite in the spirit ofMaslov, “stood up for” the non-Russian nationalities: “Howare we to subordinate to it [equalisation] the whole of Russia,including Little Russia, Lithuania, Poland, and theBaltic region?” (479.) “In St. Petersburg,” he warned, “youwill have to set up a gigantic Land Office ... and maintaina staff of officials in every corner of the country” (480).These outcries about bureaucracy and serfdom in connectionwith nationalisation—these outcries of our municipalisers,inappropriately copied from the German model—are the dominant note in all the speeches of the Right. TheOctobrist Shidlovsky, for example, opposing compulsoryalienation, accuses the Cadets of advocating “attachmentto the land” (12th session of the Second Duma, March19, 1907, p. 752). Shulgin howls about property being inviolate,about compulsory alienation being “the grave ofculture and civilisation” (16th session, March 26, 1907,p. 1133). Shulgin refers—he might have been quoting fromPlekhanov’s Diary, 136 though he does not say so—totwelfth-century China, to the deplorable result of the Chineseexperiment in nationalisation (p. 1137). Here is Skirmuntin the First Duma: The state will be the owner! “Ablessing, an El Dorado for the bureaucracy” (10th session,May 16, 1906, p. 410). Here is the Octobrist Tantsov, exclaimingin the Second Duma: “With far greater justification,these reproaches [about serfdom] can be flung backto the Left and to the Centre. What do these Bills holdout for the peasants in reality if not the prospect of beingtied to the land, if not the old serfdom, only in a differentform, in which the place of the landlord will be taken byusurers and government officials” (39th session, May 16,1907, p. 653).Of course, the hypocrisy of these outcries about bureaucracyis most glaring, for the excellent idea of setting uplocal land committees to be elected by universal, direct, andequal suffrage by secret ballot was advanced by the very