V. I. Lenin
1905-1910
Plan for an Article “1895 and 1905 (Short Parallel)”{4}
Written: Written before January 9 (22), 1905
Published:
First published in 1926 in Lenin Miscellany V.
Printed from the original.
Source:
Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
1977,
Moscow,
Volume 41,
pages 137-138.1.
Translated: Yuri Sdobnikov
Transcription\Markup:
R. Cymbala
Copyleft:
V. I. Lenin Internet Archive (www.marxists.org)
© 2004
Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the
terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.
Other
Formats:
Text
1895 and 1905
[SQUIGLY.]
(Short Parallel)
There are here
eigentlich{1}
two topics:
1) the parallel of growing work; 2) present day organisational tasks. They
should be dealt with in two separate articles.
-
1. Compare the scope, proportions and forms of Social-Democratic work then
and now.
-
2. Scope: only circles then. Scarcely the first beginnings
of mass agitation. Propaganda very heavy and academic.
The Social-Democrats making their way among the
Narodnaya Volya movement, the Narodnoye
Pravo{5} movement, etc.
-
3. Today. The Party. Ordinary mass agitation. Open political action in the
street. Revolutionary epoch.
-
4. Forms. 10–16 persons (committee). 20–30 workers’ circles. Maximum, 100–150
ties. “Readings.” Self-education—the crux.
-
5. Today. The organisation has grown to many “storeys”
St. Petersburg and Odessa
[committee—districts—organisers’
meetings (central circles)—groups, and then “the centre”
and the bureau. Something like five new storeys.]
-
6. “A Letter to a
Comrade”{2}
was written at a time when the new storeys
were being put together and the Economists slowed down their growth. The
ideas advocated in “A Letter to a Comrade” have now virtually
been translated into life.
7. New tasks: γ) Abundance of storeys has brought up a new section of Party
workers, Party members. Their participation should be formalised. (1)
Information—resolutions—polls—direct ties with the Central
Organ.
(2) Elective principle? (3) Indication or selection of candidates for
co-optation?
8. Another and perhaps even more important task: the work of adding new
horizontal storeys should be supplemented by the work of new
“vertical”, you might say, ways of influence. That is: the growth
of the movement makes it necessary and possible to supplement this current
work on the storeys by the upper storeys addressing the mass in new
forms of massive meetings. “Short meetings” and “mass
rallies”, as a natural product of work on many “storeys”,
of themselves lead up to that higher form which prevails abroad and will
triumph here le lendemain de la
révolution,{3}
namely: to the “mass
rallies” as the principal means of political influence on the
proletariat and its Social-Democratic education.
9. Of course, this makes the “storeys” equally
necessary. They will (always?) be necessary. The thing is to “supplement”
and not to “substitute”....
Notes
{1}
Strictly speaking.—Ed.
{2}
See present edition, Vol. 6, pp. 231-52.—Ed.
{3}
The day after the revolution.—Ed.
{4}
The article was not written.
p. 137
{5}
Narodnoye Pravo (People’s Right)—an illegal party of Russian
democratic-minded intellectuals, founded in the summer of 1893 with the
participation of former members of the Narodnaya Volya, 0. V. Aptekman,
A. I. Bogdanovich, A. V. Gedeonovsky, M. A. Natanson, N. S. Tyutchev and
others. Members of the Narodnoye Pravo Party set themselves the task of
uniting all opposition forces to fight for political reform. The party put
out two programme documents: “Manifesto” and “Vital Question”. In the
spring of 1894 it was broken up by the tsarist government. Lenin gave an
assessment of the Narodnoye Pravo Party as a political organisation in his
What the “Friends of the People” Are and How They Fight the
Social-Democrats and The Tasks of the Russian
Social-Democrats
(see present edition, Vol. 1, pp. 129–332 and Vol. 2, pp. 323–51).
Most of the members of the Narodnoye Pravo Party subsequently joined the
Socialist-Revolutionaries.
p. 137