“protested, execrated the Reform, wanted it to fail, wanted the government to get tied up in its equilibristics between the liberals and the landlords, and wanted a crash to take place that would bring Russia out on the high road of open class struggle.” (p 282)
Such a stance was in total opposition to that of the liberal Narodniks, who claimed heritage from him, and those like him. Instead, after all of the dire warnings he had given had been proved right, the liberal Narodniks sang praises to the Reform.
“I repeat, their attitude towards the peasant Reform is most striking proof of how profoundly bourgeois our democrats have become. These gentlemen have learned nothing, but have forgotten very, very much.” (p 283)
Lenin also takes an article from Otechestvenniye Zapiski, from 1872, “The Plutocracy and its Basis.” In it, the author bemoans the fact that everyone was happy with the result of the Reform. By everyone he means the intelligentsia, not the workers, because he recognised that liberalism simply gave democratic cover for the plutocracy. This is at a point where such democrats stood on the same side as the socialists, and it was from this perspective that they were progressive. But, there is a necessary contradiction in this stance, because the acceptance of the existence of the plutocracy is at odds with the general assumptions of Narodism, which the journal represented. Those assumptions were that there were no bourgeois features of the Reform, they denied the class character of the state, and the intelligentsia, and that there was any basis for capitalism in Russia.
“The “friends of the people” have forgotten this antagonism; they have lost all sensibility of the fact that in this country, too, in Holy Russia, the pure-blooded bourgeois hide “under the cloak of democracy”; and that is why they are now reactionary (in relation to the proletariat), for they gloss over the antagonism, and talk, not of struggle, but of conciliatory, ”uplift” activity.” (p 284)
Narodism, in the 1860's and 70's recognised this contradiction and recognised that “freedom of acquisition” of “big capital”, “big credits” and “big technical improvements”, were liberal demands. They were designed in the interests of the bourgeoisie. In the 1890's, the liberal Narodniks supported the same demands, but now in the name of “small credits, small capital, small technical improvements”. (p 284)
The only thing that had made Narodism progressive, in its earlier manifestation, was the fact that it recognised this contradiction and attacked the way liberalism provided democratic cover for the plutocracy, but the liberal Narodniks had lost that element entirely.
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