Lenin and the elections to the bourgeois parliament

 

Anatoly SHKATOV, Pravda,No. 69 ,July 4, 2024 — 

“True Marxists” often criticize the CPRF for participating in election campaigns, while referring to V.I. Lenin, who allegedly called for a permanent boycott of elections and bourgeois parliamentarism – while these orators either did not read the original source at all, or interpret it in their own interests, completely ignoring the context of the historical situation of the late 19th – early 20th centuries.

We decided to turn to the Complete Works to draw a conclusion about how the founder of the Bolshevik Party actually treated elections and what goals he set for participating in election campaigns. We can say with confidence: almost everything that the brilliant visionary Lenin spoke and wrote about is also quite relevant to the present moment.

  For the first time, V. I. Ulyanov (who at that time had not yet signed his later famous pseudonym) addressed the topic of the electoral system in his works in 1895-1896, when the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party did not yet exist, but its direct predecessor, the “Union of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class,” had already been created, for which the “Draft and Explanation of the Program of the Social Democratic Party” were prepared. In his programmatic article, V. I. Ulyanov declared the demand for convening the Zemsky Sobor to develop a Constitution, as well as the introduction of universal and direct suffrage for all citizens who had reached the age of 21.

Today, someone might call such postulates not socialist at all, but even… liberal. However, it should be understood that the word “liberalism” during the 19th and early 20th centuries did not mean exactly what is understood by this term today, and was not at all close to the concept of “democracy.” There was an electoral qualification everywhere: only citizens who owned a certain amount of property had the right to vote, which, of course, contributed to the retention of power by the bourgeoisie, whose interests were defended by liberal parties (by the way, the statement of the Prime Minister of France in the mid-19th century François Guizot was quite in the liberal spirit, in response to citizens’ dissatisfaction with their lack of voting rights, suggesting that they… get rich in order to overcome the above-mentioned qualification). The demand of V.I. Ulyanov’s idea of ​​democratizing the country through the introduction of universal suffrage and parliamentarism struck both at the interests of the nobility, expressed in the autocratic monarchy, and at the interests of the bourgeoisie, which by no means extended its “freedom-loving” slogans to the workers and peasants.

At the same time, V.I. Lenin never doubted that in the conditions of maintaining authoritarian, autocratic rule in the country, the freedom of parliamentarism could not exist. Back in 1903 (two years before the First Russian Revolution and the creation of the State Duma!) in the article “To the Village Poor” he said: “The State Duma is not a people’s assembly of deputies, but a police assembly of nobles and merchants. The State Duma is assembled not to ensure people’s freedom and elective government, but to deceive the workers and peasants, enslaving them even more.”

In 1905, a revolution raged in Russia, prepared by the peasants’ land shortage, the proletarian lack of rights, and the dissatisfaction of large entrepreneurs with their political position. During the days of the largest October All-Russian strike in the country’s history, Prime Minister Sergei Witte, a protege of the bourgeoisie, in order to distract the common people from the revolutionary events, by force convinced Nicholas II to sign the famous manifesto, which proclaimed political rights and freedoms for the inhabitants of the empire and established the State Duma, elections to which were to take place at the beginning of the following year.

The attitude of the Social Democrats towards the All-Russian parliament being created was ambiguous. At the 3rd Congress of the RSDLP, which took place in London in April of the same 1905, Lenin expressed himself as follows: “It is impossible to answer categorically whether one should participate in the Zemsky Sobor. Everything will depend on the political situation, the election system and other specific conditions that cannot be taken into account in advance. They say that the Zemsky Sobor is a fraud. This is true, but sometimes, in order to expose the fraud, one must take part in the elections.”

Soon, however, V. I. Lenin really does come to the idea of ​​boycotting the elections to the State Duma. In his work “Boycott of the Bulygin Duma and the Uprising” he writes: “Our tactics must consist at the present moment in supporting the idea of ​​a boycott. The very question of this boycott is a question within bourgeois democracy.”

However, Vladimir Ilyich understood the word “boycott” quite differently from how it is understood today by home-grown pseudo-Marxists who criticize the CPRF and replace real struggle with couch potato sitting. In the article “Should We Boycott the State Duma?” Lenin substantiates the following thesis: “An active boycott does not mean simple exclusion from elections, but the wide use of election meetings for social democratic agitation and organization. To use meetings means to penetrate them both legally (by registering on the electoral lists) and illegally, to set out the entire program and all the views of the socialists, to expose all the falsity and falsity of the Duma, to call for a struggle for the Constituent Assembly.”

In other words, V.I. Lenin did not call for withdrawal from participation in the election campaign as such, but expected to use pre-election meetings for active propaganda of the Bolshevik ideas, considered it necessary to make an attempt to disrupt the elections (which, by the way, the legislation of today’s bourgeois Russia does not provide for in principle) for the revolutionary transition from the bourgeois parliament to the national one – the Constituent Assembly (Lenin would come to the term “Soviets” much later). The tactic of boycotting the elections was also explained by the illegal status of the RSDLP. In the article “Why We Refuse to Participate in the Elections” Vladimir Ilyich writes: “The party cannot legally unfurl its banner during elections, cannot publicly nominate its elected representatives without betraying them to the police. In such a state of affairs, the goals of our agitation and organization are much better served by the revolutionary use of meetings without elections than by participation in meetings for legal elections.”