Vladimir Lenin
What the Counter-Revolutionary Steps
of the Provisional Government Lead To
We have received the following telegram:
"Yeniseisk. The Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies has taken cognisance
of Minister Lvov's telegram to the appointed Commissar of Yeniseisk Gubornia,
Krutovsky, sent to Yeniseisk for guidance.
We protest against the intention to reintroduce a bureaucracy. We declare,
first, that we will not stand for being ruled by appointed officials. Second,
there can be no return for officials who have been driven out by the peasants.
Third, we recognise only such local bodies as have been set up in Yeniseisk
Uyezd by the people themselves. Fourth, appointed officials can rule here only
over our dead bodies.
"Yeniseisk Soviet of Deputies"
And so the Provisional Government appoints "commissars" from Petrograd to
"direct" the activities of the Yeniseisk Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers'
Deputies, or the Yeniseisk organ of self-government. What is more, this
appointment is made in such a form as to evoke the protest of the Yeniseisk
Soviet against "the intention to reintroduce a bureaucracy".
Moreover, the Yeniseisk Soviet declares that "appointed officials can rule here
only over our dead bodies". The behaviour of the Provisional Government has
brought this remote uyezd in Siberia, as represented by its popularly elected
governing body, to a point when a direct threat of armed resistance is made
against the Provisional Government.
The Provisional Government bosses have certainly asked for it!
Yet they will go on thundering denunciations against those mischievous people
who "preach" "civil war"!
What was the idea of appointing "'commissars" from Petrograd or from any other
centre to "direct" the activities of the elec led local body? Are we to believe
that a man from outside is more familiar with local needs, more capable of
"directing" the local population? What cause did the people of Yeniseisk give
for such an absurd measure? Even if the people of Yeniseisk did run counter to
the decisions of a majority of citizens in other localities, would it not have
been better to try, for a start, to obtain some information instead of giving
occasion for talk about "bureaucracy", and provoking legitimate dissatisfaction
and resentment on the part of the local population?
To all these questions there can be only one answer. The representatives of the
landowners and capitalists sitting in the Provisional Government are determined
to preserve the old tsarist machinery of government: officials "appointed" from
above. That is what all bourgeois parliamentary republics in the world have
nearly always been doing, except for brief periods of revolution in some
countries. That is what was done to prepare the ground for the return from a
republic to a monarchy, for a return to the Napoleons, to the military
dictators. And that is what the Cadets are bent on doing when they copy those
unhappy examples.
This is a very serious matter. We should not deceive ourselves. By such measures
the Provisional Government, whether it means to or not, is preparing the ground
for a restoration of the monarchy in Russia.
The entire responsibility for any possible-and to a certain extent
inevitable-attempt to restore the monarchy in Russia rests with the Provisional
Government, which is undertaking such counter-revolutionary measures. Officials
"appointed" from above to "direct" the local population have always been a sure
step towards the restoration of the monarchy, in the same way as the standing
army and the police.
The Yeniseisk Soviet is a thousand times right, both practically and in
principle. The return of local officials who have been driven out by the
peasants should not be allowed. The introduction of "appointed" officials should
not be tolerated. Only such bodies in the local areas should be recognised as
have been set up by the people themselves.
The idea of "direction" by officials "appointed" from above is essentially false
and undemocratic, it is Caesarism, Blanquist adventurism. Engels was quite right
when, in criticising in 1891 the draft programme of the German Social-Democrats
who were badly Infected with bureaucratism, he pressed the demand for no
supervision from above over local self-government. Engels was right when he
quoted the experience of France, which, governed between 1792 and 1798 by local
elective bodies without any supervision from above, did not "fall apart", did
not "disintegrate", but, on the contrary, gained strength, became democratically
consolidated and organised.'
Foolish bureaucratic prejudices, tsarist red-tapism, reactionary professorial
ideas as to the indispensability of bureaucratism, the counter-revolutionary
tendencies and attempts of the landowners and capitalists-this is the soil which
nourishes such measures of the Provisional Government as we have been
discussing.
The healthy democratic feeling of the workers and peasants, roused by the
insulting attempt of the Provisional Government to "appoint" officials from
above to "direct" the activities of the adult local population, the overwhelming
majority, who had elected their own representatives-this is what the Yeniseisk
Soviet has revealed.
What the people need is a really democratic, workers' and peasants' republic,
whose authorities have been elected by the people and are displaceable by the
people any time they may wish it. And it is for such a republic that the workers
and peasants should fight, resisting all attempts of the Provisional Government
to restore the monarchist, tsarist methods and machinery of government.
Written: ~ 28 April , 1917
First Published: Pravda No. 43, April 28 (May 11), 1917
Transcription/Markup: David Walters and Brian Basgen
Online Version: Lenin Internet Archive (marxists.org) 1999
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