What had to happen has happened, and every conscious worker had to have been prepared for it—an open merging of the entire Polish bourgeoisie with dying absolutism against the workers’ revolution. From the beginning of the [Russo-Japanese] war and the revolutionary ferment in the tsarist empire, the Polish bourgeoisie was the home of dishonor, the only part of the disintegrating empire—with the exception of the Polish proletariat—in which the bourgeoisie retained the quietness of a funeral attendee. While in Russia, that “wild,” “uncivilized” Russia, that our newspaper hacks were accustomed to look down upon, one social stratum after another stood up against the tsarist government, and the liberal nobility, professors, students, doctors, lawyers, municipal councils, one corporation after another, one congress after another, presented sharp resolutions and demands for political freedom—here in Poland, no voice was even heard.
Our nobility was silent, silent was the bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie, and even the intelligentsia remained silent. Like obedient dogs, the propertied classes throughout our country were supporting the cause of absolutism by their silence. The Polish worker alone saved the honor of our country, performing valiantly with revolutionary slogans in accompaniment with the Russian Revolution. In the end, finally, our petty-bourgeois intelligentsia began to move in Warsaw; they managed to hold several “secret” rallies just to prove to the world that nationalism had led them to utter intellectual debasement. The only work of these “rallies” was to present a nonsensical and backward program for a Polish Federation without political freedom in Russia—and also to pronounce a prohibition against the class party of the proletariat, a prohibition against entering into deliberations with Social Democracy. After a while, that rabbit “action” of the Polish intelligentsia was drowned in oblivion, remaining only as a sadly humorous episode in the history of the current revolution.
Then came the second period. Our proletariat, keeping pace with the Russian, was already engaged in bloody battles with the soldiers on the streets. In Russia, the government had already ceased the liberal comedy and sharply forbade the bourgeois sectors their aspirations for freedom of expression. The pavements of Petersburg, Warsaw, Łódź, and Białystok were drenched with the blood of murdered working people.
All agreements between the bourgeois opposition element in Russian society and the government were also broken, and any hopes for reform abandoned. It was then that an entire servile pilgrimage dragged its way from Poland to Petersburg, complete with memorandums and deputations to beg the ruling murderers for mercy for our country. The Polish bourgeoisie again was nothing but a disgrace to the revolution, and ours was the only country shamelessly pleading and begging at the steps of that government, one that the whole civilized world spits at with contempt.
And after the outbreak of the general strike, when all of the working class stood with us in the fight for the overthrow of despotism, for a republic, not deterred by the heaviest casualties, our bourgeois society still tried to beg from that rogue absolutism—“a Polish school system,” retaining the tsar but “Polish,” and in spite of the killing of workers, it would be “Polish,” and the knout would still rule, but it would be a “Polish” knout. Throughout the Russian state, it was again the only example of issuing such a disgraceful request instead of demanding reforms and political freedom.
Now, after May 1, has come a third period. Thanks to the magnificent May Day demonstration and the heroic victims sacrificed by our proletariat at that time, it now stands in the front rank of the general public revolution. At the same time our bourgeoisie, with its deputations to the governor-general, has moved openly toward an alliance with the tsarist government. It is significant that on May 10 in the anteroom of the tsarist satrap, two deputations met: one giving thanks for “religious tolerance” and the other taking up the case of the murders in May.
One should consider for a moment the meaning of that “decree on tolerance.” Up until then, non-Orthodox people—Uniates,* Dukhobors,† Old Believers,‡ etc.—were forced to convert to the faith of the ruler; they were persecuted with robberies, murders, sent to Siberia, held and tortured in prisons. Now the same government of murderers has generously promised not to do robberies any more, to stop violating the religious conscience. But freedom of conscience without political freedom, without freedom of religion, is a mockery. When freedom of conscience is not based on law, on the will of the people and its representatives, then one stroke of the pen by the tsarist thugs may at any moment turn things to ruin again. Besides, the robberies, the raping of women by soldiers, the anti-Jewish incidents, and so on, were never based on “law” or a decree of the tsar. These abominations were always the simple consequence of unlimited arbitrariness on the part of the government bureaucrats and the tsarist army officers, considering the life and conscience of people as nothing. Therefore, as long as this lawlessness continues, meaning as long as absolutism lasts, “freedom of conscience” and “religious tolerance” will be an outright lie, a miserable cheating comedy for gullible people! And here the Polish bourgeoisie and the Polish clergy rushed to help the thugs in this wicked comedy and this cheating.
The tsar-murderer, being guilty of thousands of crimes toward the Catholics, the Uniates, the Dukhobors, the Jews, issues a decree in that he declares that he wants henceforth to “tolerate” non-Orthodox religions, and our bourgeoisie runs to gratefully kiss his Cossack boots that just ten days earlier had trampled the corpses of Polish workers on Aleje Jerozolimskie!*
The tsarist government promises to “tolerate” the religious conscience of its “subjects” while arranging on the same day a new massacre of Jews in Zhytomyr†—and our bourgeois crawl like dogs under the feet of the murderers, to thank them for these generous gifts! Hallelujah! Glory be to the Lord in the highest! Absolutism, dripping with blood, has promised to be no longer exclusively “Orthodox;” it has decided to be a “Catholic” absolutism. Is that not reason enough for joy and gratitude for the Polish gentiles and the Polish Catholic clergy? Again, Poland gave the only example of such disgrace throughout the Russian state—because it was the first case, after the outbreak of the revolution, of anyone going to the tsarist government with their thanks for such a low and wicked comedy, such a parody of reform.
In Russia alone, only reactionaries properly considered as the government’s agents and generally despised by all liberal and progressive sectors, such as, for instance, the gentlemen of Moskovskie Vedomosti [Moscow News], and perhaps only some high officials among the Orthodox priests, dare to sing hymns about the tsar’s reform. And bourgeois society in Russia met with contemptuous silence that bloody mockery of dying despotism. The Polish bourgeoisie was the only one that remained silent when the Russian intelligentsia was raising loud demands for political freedom. The Polish bourgeoisie then was the only one that went to beg and submit, while in Russia the liberal and democratic sectors had only cold condemnation for the government. And now the Polish bourgeoisie is the only one that loudly gives thanks for the reforms, whose only aim is—to deceive the fighting people, to deceive public opinion and extend the death agony of this murderous despotism!
Supposedly the second deputation of “citizens” that asked for a strict inquiry into the May Day massacre was an expression of sympathy toward the murdered workers.
But our workers would be too naive if they believed that. The political meaning of this deputation was quite the opposite. The “citizens” went to the head of the tsarist government in our country with a plea, asking for a strict investigation, and they solemnly pointed out that the government alone was not to blame and that it alone was not responsible for the slaughter. By asking the ringleader of the bullies to be the judge of the May Day carnage, they admitted that they did not consider the actual perpetrators to be the culprits. Asking for a strict investigation of a case that is so frighteningly clear and simple as murder of defenseless people in broad daylight, asking for “investigation and study,” where the evidence was the pools of workers’ blood along with splashes of brain, crushed bones, and flesh torn to shreds, and the presenters of the evidence (the prosecutors) were the cobblestone street and the bright sun in the sky—asking this lackey of the tsar to lead the investigation in such a case is something. The citizens testified loudly that they did not believe the carnage was a conscious political act of absolutism, part of its very essence, and that it was all just a misunderstanding, a case that one needs to “investigate.” In other words, by requesting an investigation, the “citizens” deliberately denied that the May Day massacre had been a confrontation between the revolutionary people and the government; they conferred upon it the random nature of an “unfortunate incident.” And, above all, by going to the governor-general with a plea to investigate the May Day massacre, our bourgeoisie is declaring to the tsarist government: “We are eager to reassure you, on the day after the killing of our workers, that despite these murders, you have not stopped being for us the ruling government, that we still recognize you as the lord of our country, as the supreme judge, placed over us by the power of God’s law!” That was the purpose and meaning of the deputation of the Warsaw “citizens” to the governor-general on May 10.
Giving thanks for the tsar’s “religious reform” and solemnly recognizing the tsarist government’s integrity despite the May Day carnage, these two deputations merged in the hallways of the castle on the Vistula River into one solid chorus of our bourgeoisie (singing) to this note: “We stand by your side, bloody tsar, and want to stand there!”
II
Big bourgeois industry, under today’s capitalist conditions, is the natural political leader of the possessing classes. And here in our country today, fighting against the workers’ revolution and for an open alliance with the tsar, all layers of the Polish bourgeoisie are closely grouped around the industrial bourgeoisie. For each of them, dying absolutism has something in its pocket to offer, and each of them wants to beg something for themselves after the betrayal of the revolutionary proletariat. The Polish nobility expects to bring “regional [and] local self-government” to our country.
But what is this self-government? Tsar Alexander II, back in the 1860s, after the defeat at Sevastopol,* when he had to introduce some liberal reforms to improve his almost entirely rotten tsarist empire, gave to the nobility of Russia some rights to freedom for school management, care about the health and well-being of the rural population, etc. But, for a long time already, the entire system of local self-government in Russia has fallen completely into the hands of the tsar’s chinovniks† and the interior minister, who can cancel any resolution of an assembly, remove the chairmen of these assemblies and generally restrain the local government at every turn. It is precisely this destruction of local self-government by the arbitrariness of the tsarist chinovniks that was one of the main reasons for dissatisfaction and opposition among the Russian progressive nobility. So memorable is this fact that the first open request for a constitution and call for an assembly of people’s representatives came from the sectors of liberal Russia. It was the voice of the assembly of the zemstvo nobility in Petersburg in November last year [1904]. And now this “local self-government,” which remains only in part, and in name only, whose essence has been almost completely sucked out by absolutism, is to be generously donated—to the Polish nobility.
But the tsarist government knows exactly for whom and what to donate! Even in Russia, only affluent landowners were entitled to be elected to the local zemstvo governments. Peasants and landless persons had no participation in such local “self-government.” But since the Russian nobility is largely liberal, it made use of what was permitted to the local “self-government”—improving the rural schools, spreading education among the people, building hospitals, improving roads and other means of communication, providing aid to the peasantry during crop failures, etc. In our country, the nobility does not support liberalism in any way, but the opposite is true—it is the main pillar of the most arrogant reaction. In its hands, “local self-government” will only become a new way of looting and suppressing the peasants; it will become the new scourge of God. In other words, “self-government” by the Polish nobility will become a millstone around the neck of the poor peasants. Therefore, our nobility welcomes the tsar’s “local self-government” as a small partial restoration of the rights it enjoyed in the “golden era” of serfdom. So it is not surprising that the nobility stretches out its hands with joy and gratitude for the gifts of Tsar Nicholas the Last.
To the committee debating a consideration of this new benefit, the tsar’s government appointed fourteen representatives of the Polish nobility, and the Polish counts rushed with their humble thanks to the bosom of their Little Father, the murderer-tsar. The deputation giving thanks for religious tolerance had already knelt at the tsar’s feet, Catholic and Protestant priests fraternally united in their flunkey-type behavior of bowing to the robbers. But not only did the bourgeoisie, nobility, and clergy enter into an open alliance with the tsar. Our Polish intelligentsia even here remains true to its matrix—the bourgeoisie. The Polish press—from the most conservative to the progressive liberal newspaper Prawda (Truth)*—began to gnash its teeth and foam at the mouth against the revolutionary workers who had no respect for anything—neither for the holy law of capitalist exploitation nor for the holy tsarist knout. The Polish intelligentsia waits with its dog’s eagerness, watching closely for that important bone of grace received from bloody hands—the admission of some Pole to a government position. And the tsarist government most likely will continue until its very last hour to reward this Polish loyalty to the Russian knout—by granting to some members of the Polish intelligentsia the uniform and salary of a tsarist chinovnik. The bourgeoisie, nobility, clergy, and intelligentsia were also joined, last of all, by our patriotic petty bourgeoisie, whose mouthpiece is the so-called “National Democracy.”
Having already abandoned its utopian program of rebuilding Poland two years ago, this party has now openly announced a new political “program” for a stubborn fight against the revolutionary proletariat and in defense of capital and indirectly absolutism. In May, in the same country that saw the corpses of murdered Polish workers on the streets of Warsaw, and the Polish bourgeoisie, nobility, and clergy [crawling] at the feet of the murderers, the National Democracy publicly issued a proclamation to the workers, heaving bile and spittle against “international red socialism,” against “riots,” against the general strike, against demonstrations, and against the economic struggle of the workers. Saving “national industry” and having “peace and quiet,” that is to say, saving the profits of the factory owners and preserving the rule of the tsarist government—that is what the program of our “National Democracy” is all about today.
In this way, all other classes and social sectors in our country have joined together against the militant working class. On one side stands the revolutionary proletariat, and on the other, gathered together around the throne of the tsar for his protection and their own, all of bourgeois Poland.
III
This position taken by the Polish bourgeoisie is no surprise for any class-conscious worker familiar with the teachings of Social Democracy. Only the social-patriotic PPS, which has been telling the workers for ten years that Polish society is “revolutionary through and through” and that the reactionary ugodowcy† are a mere “handful” without any influence—this same PPS stands today, in the light of recent events, like a con man who has been exposed and denounced in public.
In this betrayal of the revolutionary cause by the Polish bourgeoisie and Polish intelligentsia, the PPS itself took a very active part in giving a build-up to the servile delegation to the tsar’s ministers to beg for a “Polish school system,” as though this entire attempt to [undermine and defeat] the revolution politically with the swindle of a “Polish school system”—as though that were a highly revolutionary action by “society.” When these servile citizens of Warsaw, led by Count [Wladysław] Tyszkiewicz, had fortunately found their way into the antechambers of government ministers in Petersburg, where on the street the blood of the workers murdered there had not yet dried, at the same time the PPS was writing in its Kraków newspaper Naprzód on March 24: “The energetic action of society in the Kingdom [of Poland] on the question of Polonization of the school system found itself on the very best road—in spite of the voices of conciliationists crying in the wilderness.”
And this is proved by their basing their information on none other than—Novoye Vremya [New Times].* This “information” was related to plans for “reform” that were expected to come from the tsar’s Committee of Ministers. And in this way the PPS itself was helping to deceive the people into believing that from the tsarist government there could really come genuine reform of the school system—just as the bourgeoisie and clergy are now deceiving the people that “religious toleration” is really possible under the tsar.
Meanwhile, the PPS in its Kraków newspaper Naprzód [Forward] even wrote with pride that this whole operation of the bourgeoisie about a “Polish school system” was the result of the activity and influence of the PPS itself. In the issue of that paper for February 22, in regard to this “operation,” we read: “The active and energetic policies of the Polish Socialist Party are beginning to bear fruit.
Thus, the PPS itself facilitated and prepared the current betrayal of the workers by the Polish intelligentsia and petty bourgeoisie, and the PPS for its part issued, at the end of January and under the pretense that this was socialism, a cunning plan for local self-government in Poland without a demand for a republic or even political freedoms in Russia. The PPS went down the same road paved earlier by certain elements of National Democracy from the time of the childish rallies in Warsaw. Following National Democracy down that road, there then came the pettybourgeois, nationalist intelligentsia, and then the nationalist PPS.
It stands to reason that the PPS cries out that it, too, wants to overthrow the tsarist regime. Only a few years ago, it had the courage at least to talk about [obtaining] “cannons” for an “uprising.” The PPS fantasized that it alone was capable of overthrowing absolutism with such an uprising. But the problem is not what a particular party thinks or says, but what it actually does. What are its actual policies and actions, and what are the logical results and consequences of those policies? Today, after the beginning of the revolution in the tsarist empire, the PPS has no courage to boast about an “uprising.” Restoration of a “workers’ Poland” has turned into “autonomy for Poland” and “a parliament in Warsaw.” This is the same old nationalism, but far more cowardly and more reactionary, because whoever demands “autonomy for Poland,” without demanding at the same time, and above all, political freedoms and a republic in Russia itself, without advocating a fight for those freedoms together with the Russian proletariat, that person deceives the workers, as if “autonomy in Poland” could be anything other than part of freedom in Russia—as if this were possible without freedom from the empire, and its still-powerful sovereign, the Russian tsar. And any person who at the present moment deceives the revolutionary workers [with such talk] is really acting in the same way as the National Democrats and the whole bourgeoisie.
They all want “autonomy for Poland” without the overthrow of the tsarist regime in Russia. But such “autonomy” with the tsar, in our conditions, is nothing else but that same “local self-government” for the [Zygmunt] Krasińskis, [Aleksander] Wielopolskis, and [Stanisław] Grabskis.* And asking our workers to be humble in relation to the tsar and capitalists is just like the granting of religious tolerance for our priests, like those government jobs that the Polish intelligentsia dreams about, like a “Polish school system” to be granted by the grace of the tsar, and finally, like the Polish nobility, bourgeoisie, and petty bourgeoisie organizing together for the “national” suppression of the Polish revolutionary proletariat.
At the highest peak of such “autonomy” in Poland, with the sovereign tsar in Russia, we will see a moment when the beloved tsar will allow Polish citizens to organize armed “national guards,” who will defend domestic industry and public safety on the streets of Warsaw, Łódź, and Częstochowa and “autonomously” take the place of tsarist soldiers in the murder of strikers or of demonstrating Polish workers.
This is the true meaning and essence of the “political declaration” of the PPS at the end of January, and its [call for a] “parliament in Warsaw” without any republic in Petersburg. As always, social-patriotism covers itself and its bourgeois reactionary nature, unconsciously and thoughtlessly, with the banner of socialism. “Autonomy in Poland” without a demand for a republic in Russia as a socialist program—that is an absurd, cowardly, cunning platitude. And as a reality—stated honestly, without the cover of socialism—such a platitude is the same as the current program of “National Democracy” and that of our entire bourgeoisie, which has united with the tsar.
The open unification of the bourgeois classes with absolutism, in which they reveal themselves as totally reactionary, is (in truth) only beneficial for the cause of the working class. This makes it easier for the broad working masses in our country to quickly understand that their true and constant enemy is not only dying absolutism, at whose hand the fighting workers are being killed today, but also the Polish bourgeois class, at whose hand they will be killed tomorrow.
The victory of the revolution and the overthrow of the tsarist regime will not end the fight for the workers, but only open a new era of struggle—against the bourgeoisie. And for that fight, eye-to-eye and chest-to-chest, with the class of the combined exploiters the mass of workers must hasten to get organized. Only with a united, compact, powerful Social Democratic party, conscious of the interests and objectives of the workers, can our proletariat arm itself against the future political rule of one of the most villainous and despicable, one of the most obscurantist bourgeoisies in the world.