Vladimir Lenin
May Day Action by the Revolutionary Proletariat
Written: June 15, 1913
Source:Collected Works,Volume 19, pp. 218-227
First Published: June 15, 1913 -- Soisial-Demokrat, No. 31
Translated: George Hanna
Online Version: marx.org 1996; marxists.org 1999
Transcribed: Robert Cymbala
HTML Markup: Brian Basgen and David Walters
Ayear has passed since the Lena events and the first, decisive upsurgence in the
revolutionary working-class movement since the June Third coup. The tsar's Black
Hundreds and the landowners, the mob of officials and the bourgeoisie have
celebrated the 300th anniversary of plunder, Tatar incursions, and the
disgracing of Russia by the Romanovs. The Fourth Duma has convened and begun its
"work" though it has no faith in that work and has quite lost its former
counter-revolutionary vigour. Confusion and tedium have beset liberal society,
which is listlessly making appeals for reforms while admitting the
impracticability of anything even approximating reform.
And now comes a May Day action by Russia's working class, who first held a
rehearsal in Riga, then went into resolute action in St,. Petersburg on May 1
(O.S.); this action has rent the dim and dreary atmosphere like a thunderbolt.
The tasks of the approaching revolution have come to the fore again in all their
grandeur, and the forces of the advanced class leading it stand out in bold
relief before hundreds of old revolutionaries, whom persecution by hangmen and
desertion by friends have not defeated or broken, and before millions of people
of the new generation of democrats and socialists.
Weeks before May Day, the government appeared to have lost its wits, while the
gentlemen who own factories behaved as if they had never had any wits at all.
The arrests and searches seemed to have turned all the workers' districts in the
capital upside down. The provinces did not lag behind the centre. The harassed
factory owners called conferences and adopted contradictory slogans, now
threatening the workers with punishment and lock-outs, now making concessions in
advance and consenting to stop work, now inciting the government to commit
atrocities, now reproaching the government and calling on it to include May Day
in the number of official holidays.
But even though the gendarmes showed the utmost zeal, even though they "purged"
the industrial suburbs, even though they made arrests right and left according
to their latest "lists of suspects", it was no use. The workers laughed at the
impotent rage of the tsar's gang and the capitalist class and derided the
governor's menacing and pitiful "announcements"; they wrote satirical verses and
circulated them by hand or passed them on by word of mouth; they produced, as if
from nowhere fresh batches of small, poorly printed "leaflets", short and plain,
but very instructive, calling for strikes and demonstrations, and reminding the
people of the old, uncurtailed, revolutionary slogans of the Social-Democrats,
who in 1905 led the first onslaught of the masses against the autocracy and
against monarchy.
A hundred thousand on strike on May Day, said the government press the next day.
Bourgeois newspapers, using the first telegraphed information, reported a
hundred and twenty-five thousand (Kievskaya Mysl). A correspondent of the
central organ of the German Social-Democrats wired from St. Petersburg that it
was a hundred and fifty thousand. And the day after the whole bourgeois press
quoted a figure of 200,000-220,000. Actually the number of strikers reached
250,000!
But, apart from the number of May Day strikers, much more impressive -- and much
more significant -- were the revolutionary street demonstrations held by the
workers. Everywhere in and around the capital crowds of workers singing
revolutionary songs, calling loudly for revolution and carrying red flags fought
for several hours against police and security forces frantically mobilised by
the government. And those workers made the keenest of the tsar's henchmen feel
that the struggle was in earnest, that the police were not faced with a handful
of individuals engaged in a trivial Slavophil affair, that it was actually the
masses of the capital's working class who had risen.
This was a really brilliant, open demonstration of the proletariat's
revolutionary aspirations, of its revolutionary forces steeled and reinforced by
new generations, of revolutionary appeals to the people and the peoples of
Russia. Last year the government and the manufacturers were able to take comfort
from the fact that the Lena explosion could not have been foreseen, that they
could not have made immediate preparations to combat its consequences; this
time, however, the monarchy had displayed acute foresight, there had been ample
time for preparation and the "measures" taken were most "vigorous"; the result
was that the tsarist monarchy revealed its complete impotence when faced with a
revolutionary awakening of the proletarian masses.
Indeed, one year of strike struggle since Lena has shown, despite the pitiful
outcries of the liberals and their yes-men against the "craze for striking",
against "syndicalist" strikes, against combining economic with political strikes
and vice versa -- this year has shown that a great and irreplaceable weapon for
agitation among the masses, for rousing them, for drawing them into the struggle
the Social-Democratic proletariat had forged for itself in the revolutionary
epoch. The revolutionary mass-scale strike allowed the enemy neither rest nor
respite. It also hit the enemy's purse, and in full view of the whole world it
trampled into the mud the political prestige of the allegedly "strong" tsarist
government. It enabled more and more sections of the workers to regain at least
a small part of what had been achieved in 1905 and drew fresh sections of the
working people, even the most backward, into the struggle. It did not exhaust
the capacity of the workers, it was frequently demonstrative action of short
duration, and at the same time it paved the way for further, still more
impressive and more revolutionary open action by the masses in the shape of
street demonstrations.
During the last year, no country in the world has seen so many people on strike
for political ends as Russia, or such perseverance, such variety, such vigour in
strikes. This circumstance alone shows to the full the pettiness, the
contemptible stupidity of those liberal and liquidationist sages who tried to
"adjust" the tactics of the Russian workers in 1912-13, using the yardstick of
"European" constitutional periods, periods that were mainly devoted to the
preparatory work of bringing socialist education and enlightenment to the
masses.
The colossal superiority of the Russian strikes over those in the European
countries, the most advanced countries, demonstrates, not the special qualities
or special abilities of Russia's workers, but the special conditions in
present-day Russia, the existence of a revolutionary situation, the growth of a
directly revolutionary crisis. When the moment of a similar growth of revolution
approaches in Europe (there it will be a socialist, and not a
bourgeois-democratic revolution, as in our country), the proletariat of the most
developed capitalist countries will launch far more vigorous revolutionary
strikes, demonstrations, and armed struggle against the defenders of
wage-slavery.
This year's May Day strike, like the series of strikes in Russia during the last
eighteen months, was revolutionary in character as distinguished not only from
the usual economic strikes but from demonstration strikes and from political
strikes demanding constitutional reforms, like, for instance, the last Belgian
strike." Those who are in bondage to a liberal world outlook and no longer able
to consider things from the revolutionary standpoint, cannot possibly understand
this distinctive character of the Russian strikes, a character that is due
entirely to the revolutionary state of Russia. The epoch of counter-revolution
and of free play for renegade sentiment has left behind it too many people of
this kind even among those who would like to be called Social-Democrats.
Russia is experiencing a revolutionary situation because the oppression of the
vast majority of the population -- not only of the proletariat but of
nine-tenths of the small producers, particularly the peasants -- has intensified
to the maximum, and this intensified oppression, starvation, poverty, lack of
rights, humiliation of the people is, furthermore, glaringly inconsistent with
the state of Russia's productive forces, inconsistent with the level of the
class-consciousness and the demands of the masses roused by the year 1905, and
inconsistent with the state of affairs in all neighbouring -- not only European
but Asian -- countries.
But that is not all. Oppression alone, no matter how great, does not always give
rise to a revolutionary situation in a country. In most cases it is not enough
for revolution that the lower classes should not want to live in the old way. It
is also necessary that the upper classes should be unable to rule and govern in
the old way. This is what we see in Russia today. A political crisis is maturing
before our very eyes. The bourgeoisie has done everything in its power to back
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