Collected Works of V. I. Lenin - Vol. 3 - From Marx to Mao

640 NOTES
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exorbitant price. The Cadets favoured the retention of the
monarchy and tried to persuade the tsar and the feudal landlords
to share power with them; their main task, however, they
considered to be the fight against the revolutionary movement.
During the First World War the Cadets actively supported the
tsarist government’s foreign policy of conquest. During the
bourgeois-democratic revolution of February 1917 they tried
to save the monarchy. The Cadets in the bourgeois Provisional
Government pursued a counter-revolutionary policy, opposed
to the interests of the people but favourable to the U.S., British
and French imperialists. Following the victory of the Great
October Socialist Revolution the Cadets became irreconcilable
enemies of Soviet power and participated in all the armed counterrevolutionary
actions and campaigns of the interventionists.
When the interventionists and whiteguards were defeated, the
Cadets fled abroad, where they continued their anti-Soviet
counter-revolutionary activity. p. 33
The Party of Octobrists (or Union of October Seventeenth) represented
the interests of the big industrial capitalists and of the
big landlords who farmed their land on capitalist lines. The
Octobrists claimed to stand by the tsar’s Manifesto of October 17,
1905, in which, scared by the revolution, he promised the people
civil rights; actually, however, the Octobrists had no intention
of limiting the powers of tsarism, and fully supported both
the home and the foreign policies of the tsar’s government. p. 33
Stolypin, Pyotr Arkadyevich—Chairman of the Council of Ministers,
1906-1911, an extreme reactionary. The suppression
of the Revolution of 1905-1907 and the period of severe political
reaction that followed are connected with his name.
In an effort to provide the tsarist autocracy with a firm support
in the countryside in the shape of the kulaks, Stolypin
secured the adoption of a new agrarian law. By an edict
of November 9, 1906, each peasant became entitled to withdraw
from the village community and to have his allotment made
his private property, with the ensuing right to sell it, mortgage
it, etc., which until then had been forbidden. It was made the
duty of the community to supply the peasant leaving its ranks
with land in a single tract. The kulaks made use of this legislation
to buy up the lands of the economically weak peasants for
next to nothing. The laws of June 14, 1910, and of May 29, 1911,
provided for a compulsory arrangement of land distribution
that favoured the kulaks. p. 33
June 3, 1907, was the day on which the Second State Duma
was disbanded and a new law was promulgated dealing with
the elections to the Third State Duma, that ensured a majority
for the landlords and capitalists in the Duma. The tsar’s government
treacherously violated the Manifesto of October 17, 1905,
did away with constitutional rights and had the Social-