The masses have made themselves heard! They have kindled revolutionary flames on Caucasian hill-tops; they have clashed, breast against breast, with the guards' regiments and the cossacks on that unforgettable day of January Ninth; they have filled the streets and squares of industrial cities with the noise and clatter of their fights....
The revolutionary masses are no more a theory, they are a fact. For the Social-Democratic Party there is nothing new in this fact. We had predicted it long ago. We had seen its coming at a time when the noisy liberal banquets seemed to form a striking contrast with the political silence of the people. The revolutionary masses are a fact, was our assertion. The clever liberals shrugged their shoulders in contempt. Those gentlemen think themselves sober realists solely because they are unable to grasp the consequences of great causes, because they make it their business to be humble servants of each ephemeral political fact. They think themselves sober statesmen in spite of the fact that history mocks at their wisdom, tearing to pieces their school books, making to naught their designs, and magnificently laughing at their pompous predictions.
"There are no revolutionary people in Russia as yet." "The Russian workingman is backward in culture, in self-respect, and (we refer primarily to the workingmen of Petersburg and Moscow) he is not yet prepared for organized social and political struggle."
Thus Mr. Struve wrote in his Osvoboshdenie. He wrote it on January 7th, 1905. Two days later the proletariat of Petersburg arose.
"There are no revolutionary people in Russia as yet." These words ought to have been engraved on the forehead of Mr. Struve were it not that Mr. Struve's forehead already resembles a tombstone under which so many plans, slogans, and ideas have been buried,—Socialist, liberal, "patriotic," revolutionary, monarchic, democratic and other ideas, all of them calculated not to run too far ahead and all of them hopelessly dragging behind.
"There are no revolutionary people in Russia as yet," so it was declared through the mouth of Osvoboshdenie by Russian liberalism which in the course of three months had succeeded in convincing itself that liberalism was the main figure on the political stage and that its program and tactics would determine the future of Russia. Before this declaration had reached its readers, the wires carried into the remotest corners of the world the great message of the beginning of a National Revolution in Russia.
Yes, the Revolution has begun. We had hoped for it, we had had no doubt about it. For long years, however, it had been to us a mere deduction from our "doctrine," which all nonentities of all political denominations had mocked at. They never believed in the revolutionary rôle of the proletariat, yet they believed in the power of Zemstvo petitions, in Witte, in "blocs" combining naughts with naughts, in Svyatopolk-Mirski, in a stick of dynamite.... There was no political superstition they did not believe in. Only the belief in the proletariat to them was a superstition.
History, however, does not question political oracles, and the revolutionary people do not need a passport from political eunuchs.
The Revolution has come. One move of hers has lifted the people over scores of steps, up which in times of peace we would have had to drag ourselves with hardships and fatigue. The Revolution has come and destroyed the plans of so many politicians who had dared to make their little political calculations with no regard for the master, the revolutionary people. The Revolution has come and destroyed scores of superstitions, and has manifested the power of the program which is founded on the revolutionary logic of the development of the masses.
The Revolution has come, and the period of our political infancy has passed. Down to the archives went our traditional liberalism whose only resource was the belief in a lucky change of administrative figures. Its period of bloom was the stupid reign of Svyatopolk-Mirski. Its ripest fruit was the Ukase of December 12th. But now, January Ninth has come and effaced the "Spring," and has put military dictatorship in its place, and has promoted to the rank of Governor-General of Petersburg the same Trepov, who just before had been pulled down from the post of Moscow Chief of Police by the same liberal opposition.