Recent days have again brought another sharp turn by the tsarist government in the direction of naked and brutal reaction. No sooner had the ukase† of April 17 “on religious toleration” been issued, sending our bourgeoisie and clergy into such euphoria, and no sooner had our “citizens’ deputations” unbent their necks from their grateful bows for the “kind favors” of Nicholas the Bloody, than on May 20 the citizens were given a sharp slap in the face by way of recompense. The same governor-general Maksimovich, whom they had visited to deliver their “thanks,” issued his own decree cancelling the tsar’s decree—of course after communicating with higher authorities—explaining that “religious toleration,” which Nicholas “with his inexpressible graciousness” was kind enough to give them means in reality that the Orthodox religion will still be the dominant one, as before, and the only one that can be freely practiced. Whereas any non-Orthodox person who tries to “openly spread their beliefs” or tries to “persuade anyone else to come over to their religion” will still be prosecuted and punished, as up until now, under the strictest clauses of the penal code. “Religious toleration” by the grace of the tsar was, from the moment of its birth, already a cripple and a monstrosity. There never was any intention to give it life for more than three-quarters of a moon. The Orthodox priesthood—concerned that there would be even the slightest pretense of freedom of religion for Catholics, Uniates, and dissenters—immediately exerted their influence on the court circles that are utterly impoverished both morally and mentally. The man placed at the head of the commission on questions of “religious toleration” was none other than [Alexei] Ignatyev, the notorious Cerberus‡ who has always loyally served the “Orthodox” tsarist knout, and the decree by Maksimovich is the early fruit of this “rearrangement of the church flags.”
Thus the savage persecution of believers in other faiths could soon flow freely and unrestrictedly, with renewed force; and thus once again showing that under absolutism there can be no “toleration,” that freedom of religion, like freedom in the schools and freedom of national-cultural development, is merely a part of political freedom, and therefore the first step toward establishing “toleration” in religion, as in any other area, must be—the overthrow of absolutism.
Simultaneously with the retraction of the decree on tolerance, the tsarist government took a couple of other steps in the same spirit. By a decree of the tsar on June 6, General Trepov—appointed governor of Petersburg on the day after the January 22 butchery, still so vivid in memory, for the obvious purpose of pacifying the tsar’s “rebellious” capital city—this man Trepov, one of the chief pillars of reaction in its most brutal form, has now been appointed vice minister of internal affairs [on June 6], and with that the tsar assured him of unlimited police and gendarme powers, totally independent of his “boss,” the prime minister.*
A special task of the new police dictator is to prosecute “political offenders” and to shut down the liberals’ “unauthorized assemblies,” and to do this without any regard for “existing laws,” that is, even the “laws” of the tsar himself—in short, to stamp out the socialists and stifle the liberals.
At the same time, progress on the celebrated “constitution” was made public, being worked on by Premier [Alexander] Bułygin along the lines promised by the tsar on February 19, right after the first outbreak of revolution in Petersburg. That is to say, the tsar’s minister proposes the establishment of “popular representation” on the following bases:
The only persons who can be elected to this “parliament” granted by the grace of the tsar will be owners of large and medium-sized properties, both rural and urban; in other words, only [members of] the nobility and bourgeoisie. The qualification for the right to vote is the ownership of a certain amount of property. Poor people, the entire class of the proletariat in all of the tsardom, numbering many millions, are totally excluded from voting. But even this assembly of the rural and urban rich would not have any influence on legislation or the government. It is to deliberate on draft laws and the budget (that is, the income and expenditures of the state), but it has only a consultative voice. Laws are to be enacted in reality, just as before, solely by the “State Council,” that is, the chinovniksi, men appointed by the tsar—plus the tsar himself, as up until now. Lastly, the ministers are not in any way responsible for their behavior to this assembly of elected representatives of the nobility and urban bourgeoisie, and they remain, as before, purely the flunkeys of the tsar-autocrat. In the same way, the “representative assembly” cannot even call them to account or demand their dismissal; just as before, they are not in any way accountable, even if these chinovniks themselves have broken the law.
To complete this caricature of a puppet-show “assembly,” having no real power or authority, being authorized only to give “advice,” so that, later on, the tsar’s chinovniks can use it to wipe off their boots, Bułygin’s proposed “constitution” further specifies that all together this “assembly” will gather to give its advice for only two months out of the year—from November to January. There you have the entire tsarist “constitution”! An assembly can be convened, consisting of several hundred gentlemen elected from among the nobility and bourgeoisie, to blow some hot air and shoot the breeze, but the law, or rather, the state of lawlessness, will remain as before in the hands of the tsar and the chinovniks. Absolutism remains untouched, and the knout, as ever, rules supreme!
The proposal outlined above has not yet been adopted by the Committee of Ministers, but it shows distinctly enough what absolutism is aiming for. It shows that this regime of blood has no thought of making concessions—not a single step, not an inch of ground in that direction. Together with the retraction of the decree on religious toleration, with the awarding of dictatorial power to Trepov, with the latest terrible massacres that the news is reporting from the Caucasus, with the unceasing murders committed recently against workers everywhere in the empire—all these clearly and expressively demonstrate the following: The dying beast of despotism will leap up once again to fight like a ferocious tiger for its existence, and will try once again, as in the past, with fang and claw, to preserve its criminal way of life. Already oozing gore from a hundred wounds, fatally struck from the outside by Japanese shot and shell, assailed internally by popular revolution, blinded and raging, tsarist despotism is again gathering up its last reserves of strength to wage a life-or-death battle against the revolution, to crush with fire and the sword the people who have risen up formidably to bring down upon despotism the final judgment of history.
Thus, there can be no talk of “reforms,” not even farcical ones. Even our very backward bourgeoisie is making depressed and disappointed faces in response to this flagrant removal of all masks by the “most merciful” of autocrats. But also for the militant working class, this new turn by tsarism back to its old policies is an important development, whose consequences should be evaluated seriously. Since absolutism itself has chosen the road of open struggle and stubbornly persists in the defense of its existence and the inviolability of the reigning lawlessness, then the only way out of the present situation can be, not some partial reconciliation with absolutism, but only its total and complete destruction. That means, in other words, that the denouement and conclusion of the present political crisis still lies only in the hands of the revolutionary proletariat of the entire Russian state, just as it alone gave the present revolution its start. But this circumstance also gives hope that the political freedom that will emerge as the final result of the present crisis will have imprinted upon it the mark of the proletariat’s revolutionary struggle, not that of tsarism’s “liberal” chess play with the bourgeoisie.
In Russia, there exists, as is widely known, a bourgeois-noble [form] of liberalism, something generally unknown in our country, and there even exists a bourgeois democracy—elements of the petty bourgeoisie, the intelligentsia, and the nobility who are openly and sharply calling for political freedoms and the convening of a popular assembly. These circles, like all elements belonging to the property-owning classes, did not by themselves constitute a force capable of compelling absolutism to make concessions, but by the nature of things they were in a position to quickly get ready to take advantage of the workers’ revolutionary battles and sacrifices. The liberal section of the Russian nobility and urban bourgeoisie has followed the development of the workers’ struggle with uneasiness, regarding it only as a useful means for frightening the government and extorting concessions from it.
The class consciousness and class struggle of the proletariat developing more and more during the course of the present revolution is, in the essence of the matter, as frightening to the ruling classes in Russia as to those in Poland. Thus, the same longing for the restoration of “harmony and order” and for the quickest possible end to the current stormy period of strikes and revolutionary battles is felt nowadays in common among all bourgeois circles of the empire.
The Russian liberals—especially their most influential sector, the liberal nobility—are relying solely [on the possibility] of receiving from the government as soon as possible, and no matter how impoverished it might be, a little baby “constitution-ette,” one that would assure the open rule of the liberal nobility and bourgeoisie, which would then reconcile themselves with the government right away and energetically set about alleviating the “chaos” that the “liberal” Mr. [Aleksander] Swiętokowski complains so much about in [the Polish liberal newspaper] Prawda*—that is, suppressing the revolutionary proletariat.
These expectations and this impatience of the Russian liberals were openly expressed in recent days by Mr. Struve, the official leader of the constitutional liberals, who published an “Open Letter” to the French socialist newspaper, L’Humanité on June 8 [1905], in which he laid out the current program of his party.†
Struve writes that what Russia needs now above all else is a “strong government,” in order, first, to conclude peace with Japan without making excessively great concessions, and second, to establish “order” inside Russia. For these purposes alone, Nicholas II ought to convene an assembly of delegates of the rural landed nobility, and that gathering would quickly name names for the tsar of men who enjoy the confidence of the country and are capable of establishing a “strong government.” Let Nicholas II accept these men’s program and entrust them with power (that means give them portfolios as government ministers).
Because Russia today needs not only freedom but also a government suitable to the requirements of both freedom and order [writes Struve].
Thus, openly and without shame, the liberalism of the nobility offers its services to Nicholas the Last. As for the summoning of an assembly of people’s representatives elected on the basis of universal suffrage—there can be no question of that. Instead, the zemstvo liberals ask only that they themselves be “summoned.” They are ready to simply take the ministerial files from the bloody hands of the tsar, promising in return to conclude a “profitable” peace with Japan and to establish “order,” that is, to suppress the workers’ movement, and on top of that, even to reconcile Russia with England.
In short, Mr. Struve is trying to persuade the tsar that, to put it bluntly, Trepov is not needed at all, because the liberals themselves are capable of being “men of the iron fist.”
This confession of faith by Struve shows at what a low price the Russian liberal party is prepared to sell the cause of the people’s freedom to the tsar’s government and how impatiently they insist that the tsar should deign to accept the services they have offered him. Since there is not a trace among us in Poland of even such an impoverished liberalism as Struve represents in Russia, our bourgeoisie and nobility would undoubtedly welcome it with shouts of joy if the demands of the Russian liberals were carried out. A “strong government” and “order”—i.e., immediately turning the bullets and bayonets of “constitutional” rule against the “rebellious” workers, who would be deprived of all rights and freedoms—that is what would await us if the demands of the bourgeoisie and nobility, both Russian and Polish, all of them loyal knights of capitalist “law and order,” were to win the ear of the tsar and his advisers!
But the courtiers of liberalism will not win his ear. The very latest steps taken by absolutism show that the tsar has much more confidence in the “iron fist” of Trepov than in that of Mr. Struve, that he would rather murder the workers himself than entrust this task to “liberal” government ministers and “liberal” police chiefs.
This turn of events truly announces for us that the revolution will continue for a long time and holds, for the working class, a prospect full of heavy sacrifices as yet unheard of. But this guarantees that those sacrifices will not be in vain, that the political freedom of the future will not be merely little peacock’s feathers with which liberalism wants to decorate today’s despotic government.
Let us not delude ourselves that the working class could obtain the rulership after the overthrow of absolutism. We live in a capitalist society, and as long as the capitalist rules over the proletarian—who hires himself out as a wage laborer in the factory and on the land—the bourgeoisie and nobility will dominate the state politically. But if political freedoms are won completely in Russia and Poland, through the efforts of the revolutionary proletariat, then it will be grounded more solidly, and the broader the participation of the proletariat, the more will it be able, later on, to wage a strong defense of the class interests of the exploited generally against the rule of a “strong government” of the exploiters, and that can hasten the ultimate removal of the bourgeois “order” itself.
Thus, the open declaration of the latest political program of the government and the open admission of the program of the liberals reveal once again to the working class of the whole empire what its great tasks are at the present moment. Every day, every moment of the present revolution is for the proletariat of Russia and Poland an opportunity to quickly organize itself into a strong and conscious political party—a class party—an opportunity that history will not repeat for decades to come. Under a hail of bullets from dying despotism, the working class must now arm itself for the struggle against the coming rule of the bourgeoisie.
The present revolution is costing us terrible sacrifices. May these sacrifices buy not only formal political rights and freedoms, which are indispensable for waging the class struggle, but also that which is most valuable, the class consciousness and class organization of the proletariat. May the bourgeoisie, wherever it lifts itself to a position of power, a victory gained at the hands of the workers—may it find itself facing, not groups of workers who are dispersed, disoriented, and exhausted by the struggle, but the compact class power of the proletariat, steeled and hardened in the fire of the revolution, knowing, on the day after the revolution, how to turn the blade of the struggle against the bourgeoisie with the same strength they used, the day before, to smash the governments of despotism.