Parliamentary Illusions¶
Core Argument¶
The chapter opens with a vivid tableau of the first State Duma’s inauguration in May 1906, capturing the incongruous spectacle of peasants, priests, Poles, Tartars, and intelligentsia assembled in the Tauride Palace. Beneath this surface of democratic promise, however, ran an invisible fault line: the Tsar’s mother recoiled from the deputies’ faces, reading in them “a strange hatred for us all.” The chapter’s core argument is that the Duma was a fraudulent institution, incapable of resolving Russia’s fundamental contradictions, and that the revolutionary working-class party had to avoid being ensnared by parliamentary illusions.
The key claim is that the mistaken boycott tactic of the RSDLP handed the Cadets effective control of the Duma. The Social Democrats’ confusion—first boycotting the elections, then belatedly reversing course—allowed the Cadets to pose as the only left alternative, winning 184 seats. The Mensheviks compounded this error by supporting the Cadets’ demand for a government answerable to the Duma, a demand the chapter denounces as a bid for bourgeois power-sharing with the monarchy. Lenin opposed this, arguing that without equal, direct, and universal suffrage, the Duma was not truly representative, and that supporting the Cadets’ manoeuvres would create dangerous illusions among the masses.
The chapter draws on the historical context of the 1905 Revolution’s aftermath, when the tsarist regime had recovered from its initial alarm and was reasserting control through bullets and nooses. The Cadets’ offer to “save the autocracy from itself” was no longer needed. Lenin’s alternative tactic is illustrated through a meeting at the Baltic Shipbuilding Wharf, where he refrained from attacking the Mensheviks directly, instead concentrating his fire on landlords, capitalists, and the tsarist regime. This, the chapter argues, was Lenin’s method: relying on facts, figures, and arguments to win workers over, not sectarian polemics.
The chapter’s polemic is directed against the Mensheviks’ tail-ending of the liberals and their reduction of the Duma to the centre of all political attention. Lenin is quoted pouring scorn on the Duma’s powerlessness: it lacked bayonets and machine guns, and was “incapable of waging a resolute struggle.” The Trudovik peasant deputies, however, offered a strategic opening. Lenin grasped that their contradictory psychology—fighting landlords while not averse to compromise—could be exploited to split them from the Cadets. The chapter concludes with the Duma foundering on the land question, the Tsar’s angry assertion that “what belongs to the landlord belongs to him” spelling the end for the first Duma. The Bolsheviks’ task was to combine legal and illegal work, using the Duma tribune to expose the pseudo-parliament’s fraudulence while building revolutionary consciousness among the masses.