DBQ22-99

Document #1

Russian Social Democracy is living through a period of wavering, a period of doubts which approach self-denial. On the one hand, the labor movement separates itself from socialism. On the other, socialism separates itself from the labor movement…The labor movement, separated from Social Democracy…inevitably becomes bourgeois…Social Democrats must aspire not to assist labor, but to inculcate socialist ideas and political self-consciousness into the mass of the proletariat and to organize a revolutionary party, indissolubly bound with the spontaneous labor movement. No single class in history has ever attained mastery unless it has provided political leaders, its leading representatives, capable of organizing the movement and leading it…It is necessary to prepare men who devote to the revolution not only their free evenings, but their whole lives.

"Urgent Questions of Our Movement," Vladimir Lenin
November-December, 1900

Document #2

The Russian proletariat learned its first steps in the political circumstances created by a despotic state. Strikes forbidden by law, underground circles, illegal proclamations, street demonstrations, encounters with the police and with troops – such was the school created by the combination of a swiftly developing capitalism with an absolutism slowly surrendering its positions. The concentration of the workers in colossal enterprises, the intense character of governmental persecution, and finally the impulsiveness of a young and fresh proletariat, brought it about that the political strike, so rare in western Europe, became in Russia the fundamental method of struggle. The figures of strikes from the beginning of the present century are a most impressive index of the political history of Russia.

Vladimir Ulianov (Lenin), 1916
Library of Congress

Document #3

Private property should be abolished. All land…should be handed over to the toiling people. Only those who cultivate the land can claim a right to it…I believe that land means freedom. It is wrong to pay the landowners for the land; Will we be any better off if we wait for the Constituent Assembly to resolve the land question? In the past, the government decided the land question was for us, but their efforts only led us into bondage…The land question should be resolved now, and we should not put our trust blindly in the political parties.

A delegate at the Samara peasant guberniia
March, 1917

Document #4

…There is no revelation here for readers of Machiavelli and Vauban, who were as expert in the arts of the defense as of the destruction of a position, and judged by its faults. But here we should pay careful attention: if it is obvious that the theory of the weakest link guided Lenin in his theory of the revolutionary party (it was to be faultlessly united in consciousness and organization to avoid adverse exposure and to destroy the enemy), it was also the inspiration for his reflections on the revolution itself. How was this revolution possible in Russia, why was it victorious there? It was possible in Russia for a reason that went beyond Russia: because with the unleashing of imperialist war humanity entered into an objective revolutionary situation. Imperialism tore off the ‘peaceful’ mask of the old capitalism. The concentration of the industrial monopolies, their subordination to financial monopolies, had increased the exploitation of the workers and of the colonies. Competition between the monopolies made was inevitable.

"For Marx", by Louis Althusser
1962

Document #5

Number in thousands of participants in political strikes
Year
1903	87*
1904	25*
1905	1,843
1906	651
1907	540
1908	93
1909	8
1910	4
1911	8
1912	550
1913	502
1914 (first half)	1,059
1915	156
1916	310
1917 (January-February)	575
*The figures for 1903 and 1904 refer to all strikes, the economic undoubtedly predominating.

Document #6

Between us and them it is an impassable gulf. No matter how well they get on with individual officers, in their eyes we are all barins. When we talk about the narod, we mean the nation; when they talk about it, they understand it as meaning only the democratic lower classes. In their eyes, what has occurred is not a political but a social revolution, which in their opinion they have won and we have lost…We can find no common language: that is the accursed heritage of the old regime.

An officer of the Pavlovskii Regiment
Spring, 1917

Document #7

The passage below shows attitudes and social unrest and discrimination experienced in Russia towards the Jews, which resulted in pogroms (massacres of the Jewish people).

Do you know, brethren, workmen and peasants, who is the chief author of all our misfortunes? Do you know that the Jews of the whole world…have entered into an alliance and decided to destroy Russia completely? Whenever those betrayers of Christ come near you, tear them to pieces, kill them.

A pamphlet printed out at a police station in St. Petersburg
1905-1906

Document #8

THE RIGHT TO ISSUE LAWS

1. From now on until the convocation of the Constituent Assembly the preparation and drafting of laws shall be carried out by the Provisional Government of Workers and Peasants elected by the All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’, and Peasants’ Deputies in the order set forth in the present regulations.

2. Each law project is to be submitted to the government by the respective Commissariat concerned, over the signature of the corresponding People‘s Commissar; or it may be submitted by the Bureau of Legislative Projects attached to the government over the signature of the chief of the department.

3. After it has passed the government, the decree in its final wording is to be signed in the name of the Russian Republic by the President of the Soviet of the People’s Commissars or, acting in his stead, by the People‘s Commissar who submitted the said decree for the consideration of the government; it will then be published for general information.

4. The day of its publication in the official Gazette of the Provisional Workers’ and Peasants’ Government will be the day on which a decree is recognized as having come into force as a law.

5. Other conditions by which it may come into force may be especially mentioned, or it may become effective by telegraph, in which case it will be considered as having come into force whenever and wherever such telegrams are published.

6. The publication of government decrees by the State Senate is suspended. The Bureau of Legislative Projects attached to the Soviet of People’s Commissars is to publish periodically digests of those decrees and ordinances of the government, which have become laws.

7. The Central Executive Committee of the Soviet Workers’, Soldiers’, and Peasants’ Deputies has a right to defer, modify, or annul any decisions of the government.

Decree of the Sovnarkom, V. Ulianov (Lenin)
November 12, 1917

Document #12

…A local ‘land committee’, regarding Begichevo as already its own property, prevented me from selling anything, even from the harvest or newborn livestock, and yet demanded that agricultural activity should continue at its usual high level. Wages were rising but labor productivity was falling disastrously. The land committees insisted that expenses on the estate should be covered not from the revenues but from elsewhere: ‘Withdraw money from your bank!’ Of course, with the best will in the world, it was impossible to run an estate in these conditions.

Prince Sergei Trubetskoi, about his estate in Moscow
1917


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