Page:Lenin - What Is To Be Done - tr. Joe Fineberg (1929).pdf/91

 We urged the necessity of introducing the class struggle in the rural districts on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the emancipation of the peasantry (No. 3, and of the irreconcilability between the local government bodies and the autocracy in connection with Witte's secret memorandum (No. 4). We attacked the feudal landlords and the government which served the latter on the occasion of the passing of the law (No. 8), and welcomed the secret Zemstvo congress that was held. We urged the Zemstvo to stop making degrading petitions [No. 8], and to come out in the open to fight. We encouraged the students, who began to understand the necessity for the political struggle and began to take up that struggle [No. 3], and at the same time, we lashed out at the "barbarous lack of understanding" revealed by the adherents of the "purely student" movement, who called upon the students to abstain from taking part in the street demonstrations (No. 3, in connection with the manifesto issued by the Executive Committee of the Moscow students on February 25). We exposed the "senseless dreams" and the "lying hypocrisy" of the cunning liberals of Rossiya [No. 5] and at the same time we commented on the savage acts of the government's torture chambers where "peaceful writers, aged professors, and scientists and the liberal Zemstvo were cruelly dealt with" [No. 5, "The Police Raid on Literature"]. We exposed the real significance of the programme of the "concern of the government for the welfare of the workers," and welcomed the "valuable admission" that "it is better by granting reforms from above to forestall the demand for such reforms from below, than to wait for those demands to be put forward" [No.6]. We encouraged the protests of the statisticians [No. 7], and censured the strikebreaking statisticians [No. 9]. He who sees in these tactics the obscuring of the class consciousness of the proletariat and compromise with liberalism shows that he absolutely fails to understand the true significance of the programme of the Credo and de facto is carrying out that programme, however much he may deny this! Because, by that he is dragging Social-Democracy towards the "economic struggle against the employers and the government" but shies at liberalism,