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

AGRARIAN PROGRAMME OF SOCIAL-DEMOCRACY399Here is what the peasant Vasyutin (Kharkov Gubernia)says: “We see here in the person of the Chairman of theCouncil of Ministers not the minister of the whole country,but the minister of 130,000 landlords. Ninety million peasantsare nothing to him.... You [addressing the Right]are exploiters, you lease your land out at exorbitant rentsand skin the peasants alive.... Know that if the governmentfails to meet the people’s needs, the people will not ask foryour consent, they will take the land.... I am a Ukrainian[he relates that Catherine made Potemkin a gift of a littleestate of 27,000 dessiatins with 2,000 serfs].... Formerlyland was sold at 25 to 50 rubles per dessiatin, but now therent is 15 to 30 rubles per dessiatin, and the rent of haylandis 35 to 50 rubles. I call that fleecery. (A voice fromthe Right: “What? Fleecery?” Laughter.) Yes, don’t getexcited (applause on the Left); I call it skinning the peasantsalive” (643, 39th session, May 16).The Trudovik peasants and the peasant intellectualshave in common a vivid recollection of serfdom. They areall united by burning hatred for the landlords and thelandlord state. They are all animated with an intenserevolutionary passion. Some spontaneously exert theirefforts to “throw them off our backs”, without thinking ofthe future system they are to create. Others paint thatfuture in utopian colours. But all of them detest compromisewith the old Russia, all are fighting to shatter to bitsaccursed medievalism.Comparing the speeches of the revolutionary peasants inthe Second Duma with those of the revolutionary workers,one is struck by the following difference. The former areimbued with a far more spontaneous revolutionary spirit,a passionate desire to destroy the landlord regime immediately,and immediately to create a new system. The peasantis eager to fling himself upon the enemy at once and tostrangle him. Among the workers this revolutionary spiritis more abstract, aimed, as it were, at a remoter goal. Thisdifference is quite understandable and legitimate. The peasantis making his, bourgeois, revolution now, at this moment,and does not see its inherent contradictions, he isnot even aware that there are such contradictions. TheSocial-Democratic worker does see them and because he