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

AGAINST BOYCOTT43contrive to utilise even the worst representative institutions.A speech in the Duma will not cause any “revolution”,and propaganda in connection with the Duma is notdistinguished by any particular merits; but the advantagethat Social-Democracy can derive from the one and theother is not less, and sometimes even greater, than thatderived from a printed speech or a speech delivered atsome other gathering.And we must explain to the masses our participation inthe Octobrist Duma just as simply. Owing to the defeatof December 1905 and the failure of the attempts of 1906-07to “repair” this defeat, reaction inevitably drove us andwill continue to drive us constantly into worse and worsequasi-constitutional institutions. Always and everywherewe shall uphold our convictions and advocate our views,always insisting that no good can be expected as long asthe old regime remains, as long as it is not wholly eradicated.We shall prepare the conditions for a new upswing,and until it takes place, and in order that it may takeplace, we shall work still harder and not launch sloganswhich have meaning only when the revolution is on theupswing.It would be just as wrong to regard the boycott as aline of tactics counterposing the proletariat and part ofthe revolutionary bourgeois democracy to liberalism andreaction. The boycott is not a line of tactics, but a specialmeans of struggle suitable under special conditions. Toconfuse Bolshevism with “boycottism” would be as bad asconfusing it with “boyevism”. 22a The difference between theBolshevik and Menshevik lines of tactics is now quite clearand has taken shape in the fundamentally different resolutionsadopted in the spring of 1905 at the Bolshevik ThirdCongress in London and the Menshevik Conference in Geneva.There was no talk then either of boycott or of “boyevism”,nor could there have been. As everyone knows, ourline of tactics differed essentially from the Menshevik lineboth in the elections to the Second Duma, when we werenot boycottists, and in the Second Duma itself. The linesof tactics diverge in every field of the struggle whateverits means and methods may be, without any special methodsof struggle peculiar to either line being created. And