Written: Written on June 27 (July 10), 1906
Published:
Published on June 28, 1906 in the newspaper Ekho No. 6.
Printed from the Ekho text.
Source:
Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
1977,
Moscow,
Volume 41,
pages 182.2-183.1.
Translated: Yuri Sdobnikov
Transcription\Markup:
R. Cymbala
Copyleft:
V. I. Lenin Internet Archive (www.marxists.org)
© 2004
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On second thoughts, Rech finds that the general has asked much too much for his patronage of the Cadet minis try and it declares that the Cadets will not give up the principle of compulsory alienation of the land in favour of the peasants and total amnesty, whatever portfolios they may be offered. We think that the general, being the practical statesman that he is, will see no reason for spoiling the deal over a matter of principle. After all, under the Cadet plan not the whole of the land is subject to compulsory alienation, but only as much as has to be allocated to the peasants to enable them to pay the state taxes; further more, the owners of the alienated land are to be paid in cash “on a fair valuation” and these days money is ever so much easier to manage than land, which no longer brings in as much income as before, in view of the stubborn refusal of the peasants to cultivate it for others. As for the amnesty, the Cadets have already done their duty to the country by informing the supreme authorities of the people’s unanimous desire to see prisoners and exiles at liberty, and, to refrain from encroaching on the inalienable prerogative of the crown in this business, have decided to kill the amnesty bill which the Trudovik group intends to table in the Duma.{1} What the devil does General Trepov still want? Let’s have done with the bargaining, General, and hand over the reins to the new driver, “without any pangs, without any fatal brooding, and without futile and empty doubts”: after all, in ease of failure the “extreme measures” will still be at your disposal....
{1} First Duma (the so-called Witte Duma) was convened on April 27 (May 10), 1906, under an ordinance worked out by Chairman of the Council of Ministers S. Y. Witte.
Elected to the Duma were 478 deputies, over one-third of whom belonged to the Cadet Party. It was dissolved on July 8 (21), 1906.
Trudoviks—a group of petty-bourgeois democrats in Russian Dumas consisting of peasants and Narodnik-minded intellectuals. The Trudovik group was formed in April 1906 from the peasant deputies of the First Duma.
In the Duma the Trudoviks vacillated between the Cadets and the Social-Democrats, which was due to the class character of the peasant petty proprietors. In view of the fact that the Trudoviks represented the peasant masses, the Bolsheviks in the Duma pursued the tactic of reaching agreement with them on various questions for conducting a common struggle against the tsarist autocracy and the Cadets. In 1917, the Trudovik group merged with the Popular Socialist Party and gave active support to the bourgeois Provisional Government. After the October Revolution the Trudoviks sided with the bourgeois counter-revolution. p. 182
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