47
POLITICAL PARTIES IN RUSSIA
FROM MARX
TO MAO
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“assistant”, without specifying its powers in any way. The
nationalists and the Octobrists, for their part, do not insist
on any clearly specified powers of the Duma, let alone
on real guarantees of its powers. The Octobrist “constitu-
tionalists” fully agree with the “opponents of Constitution”
on the basis of the June Third Constitution.
The programme of the Black Hundreds is straightforward,
clear and outspoken on the point of persecuting non-Rus-
sians in general and the Jews in particular. As always,
they bring out more rudely, brazenly and incitingly what
the other government parties more or less “bashfully” or
diplomatically keep to themselves.
In reality, both the nationalists and the Octobrists have a
hand in the persecution of non-Russians, as is well known
to anyone who is at all familiar with the activity of the
Third Duma or with such press organs as Novoye Vremya,
Svet,
Golos Moskvy
41
and the like.
The question is: What is the social basis of the party of the
Rights? What class does it represent? What class does it
serve?
That party’s reversion to the slogans of serfdom, its up-
holding of all that is outdated, of all that is medieval in
Russian life, its complete satisfaction with the June Third
Constitution—the landlords’ Constitution—and its defence
of the privileges of the nobility and officialdom all provide
a clear answer to our question. The Rights are the party of
the semi-feudal landlords, of the Council of the United No-
bility.
42
Not for nothing did that Council play such a promi-
nent, indeed a leading, role in the dispersal of the Second
Duma, the change of the electoral law and the coup d’état of
June 3.
43
To give an idea of the economic strength of this class in
Russia, it is sufficient to cite the following basic fact, proved
by the data of the government statistics of landownership
in 1905, published by the Ministry of the Interior.
Less than 30,000 landlords in European Russia own
70,000,000 dessiatines of land; the same amount of land is
owned by 10,000,000 peasant households with the smallest
allotments. This makes an average of about 2,300 dessiatines
per big landlord, and, in the case of the poor peasants, an
average of 7 dessiatines per family, per household.
V. I. L E N I N
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It is quite natural and inevitable that the peasant cannot
live on such an “allotment” but can only die a slow death.
The recurrent famines which affect millions, such as this
year’s famine, continue to dislocate peasant farming in Rus-
sia following each crop failure. The peasants are compelled
to rent land from the landlords, paying for it by various
forms of labour service. To pay for the use of the land, the
peasant works for the landlord with his horse and his imple-
ments. This is nothing short of corvée, except that it is not
officially called serfdom. With 2,300 dessiatines of land at
their disposal, most of the landlords can run their estates
only by keeping the peasants in bondage, by resorting to
labour service, that is, the corvée system. They cultivate
only part of these huge estates with the help of wage-labourers.
Further, that same class of the landed nobility supplies
the state with the overwhelming majority of all higher and
middle-ranking civil servants. The privileges of officialdom
in Russia represent another side of the privileges and agrar-
ian power of the landed nobility. It is therefore natural that
the Council of the United Nobility and the “Right” parties
should uphold the policy of adhering to the old feudal
traditions not by accident, but because it is inevitable,
and not because of the “ill will” of individuals, but under
the pressure of the interests of a tremendously powerful
class. The old ruling class, the survivals of landlordism,
who remain the ruling class as in the past, has created for
itself an appropriate party—the Union of the Russian People
or the “Rights” in the Duma and in the Council of State.
44
But, since there exist representative institutions, and
since the
masses have already come out openly in the politi-
cal arena, as they did in our country in 1905, each party
must necessarily appeal to the people, within certain limits.
Now what can the Right parties appeal to the people about?
Of course, they cannot speak plainly in defence of the
interests of the landlords. What they do speak of is preserv-
ing the old traditions in general, and they spare no efforts to
foment distrust towards non-Russians, particularly towards
the Jews, to incite the utterly ignorant, the utterly benight-
ed, to pogroms, to “Yid”-baiting. They seek to conceal the
privileges of the nobility, the bureaucrats and the landlords
with talk about the “oppression” of Russians by non-Russians.