Page:Boris Zakharovich Shumyatsky - The Aims of the Bolsheviki (1919).djvu/9

 And now, what were to be the means and methods of the struggle? The Bolsheviki have always believed in the general political strike and a popular armed rising of the masses of workers and peasants, organised and led by the party which has never betrayed the red flag of the revolutionary Social-Democracy. The Mensheviki, on the other hand, considered the strike and armed rising as secondary means; they maintained that such "extreme" means should only be applied after a concerted movement of all dissatisfied classes of the population, including the bourgeoisie. They held that their foremost task was to support any kind of movement of opposition to the old order, and, in this connection, they put great hopes in the use of all manner of legal, open and permitted opportunities for the hastening of a revolutionary upheaval.

What was the attitude towards the Imperial Duma? The Bolsheviki boycotted the first Imperial Duma erected on the grave of the Revolution of 1905, which had been crushed by Czarism. They refused to take part in the elections, but, on the contrary, opposed them by word and deed, saying that the Imperial Duma was the result of an agreement between the Czarist Government and the landowning, capitalist class, which had thus received by it another instalment of governing power.

The Imperial Duma, said the Bolsheviki, is to the representatives of the old order merely a means of arresting the young revolutionary movement of 1905 people. It is only natural that the Bolsheviki could not recognise a Duma imposed by force of arms on the people of the Czar and the bourgeoisie, whose leaders, Gutchkov, Miliukov, and others, had supported the suppression of the Moscow, Krasnciarsk, and Kronstadt risings. A poor substitute this for the People's Govern-