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Timeline of events of first Duma:

1905:

• January: Bloody Sunday, peaceful march led by priest massacred by Tsar’s guards.
• January: After Bloody Sunday, Tsar ends Russo-Japanese War, recalling defeated troops.
• March: Tsar attempts to settle with the revolution by creating a Duma as an advisory body known as the Bulygin Duma. The limited nature of the Duma leads to more strikes and demonstrations.
• October: Tsar accepts October Manifesto in October 1905, reversing his decision in March 1905 to create a purely advisory body. The October Duma would have veto power over all laws.
• December: A general strike by workers was defeated by deployment of soldiers and artillery.

1906:

• 14,000 killed and 75,000 imprisoned from January, 1905 to April, 1906.
• March: First Duma election, boycotted not only by Bolsheviks but also Mensheviks as well.
• April: Duma convenes.
• July: Government, upset over vote of no confidence against Primer Minister appointed by Tsar, shuts down the Duma.
• July: Vyborg Manifesto issued by Cadet leaders calling for protests against the government. Cadet leaders arrested and jailed for a few months, then barred from voting and participation in future Dumas. This hurt the liberal bourgeois Cadets and made the Second Duma more favorable to the Left and the Bolsheviks.

The Boycott

And yet it is a historical fact, which cannot be abolished by the silence, subterfuges and evasions of the Mensheviks, that not one of them, not even Plekhanov, dared advocate in the press that we should go into the Duma. It is a fact that not a single call was issued in the press to go into the Duma. It is a fact that the Mensheviks then selves, in the leaflet issued by the Joint Central Committee of the R.S.D.L.P., officially recognised the boycott and confined the dispute only to the question of the stage at which the boycott was to be adopted. it is a fact that the Mensheviks laid emphasis, not on the elections to the Duma, but on the elections as such, and even on the process of electing as a means of organising for an uprising and for sweeping away the Duma.

The Boycott, Lenin. (https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1906/aug/21b.htm) 1906.

History has ruthlessly confuted all constitutional illusions and all “faith in the Duma”; but history has undoubtedly proved that that institution is of some, although modest, use to the revolution as a platform for agitation, for exposing the true “inner nature” of the political parties, etc.

The Boycott, Lenin. (https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1906/aug/21b.htm) 1906.

The government’s reasoning is correct: if things remain quiet, perhaps we shall not convene the Duma at all, or revert to the Bulygin laws [the parliament as merely an advisory body]. If, however, a strong movement arises, then we can try to split it by fixing a date for the elections for the time being and in this way entice certain cowards and simpletons away from the direct revolutionary struggle.

The Boycott, Lenin. (https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1906/aug/21b.htm) 1906.

Comments on Sri Lanka

The only time Lenin advocated a boycott was in partnership with the Mensheviks, the Pabloites of his day. This had a very specific historical context: the recent large-scale violence by the Russian army against the population, the end of the Russo-Japanese war, and the betrayal by the liberals of the fight against the monarchy. The situation in Sri Lanka has actually played out in the opposite way, the military and police turned the other way and allowed the people to take over the Presidential Palace and the Prime Minister’s residence, leading to the burning of the latter. The President resigned and left the country. The All Party Congress formed to include every party, not to reinforce a feudal system. As Lenin said, participation in the government could be used to “entice certain cowards and simpletons away from the direct revolutionary struggle.” He did not say that the people should not claim a reward for their “direct revolutionary struggle.”

The Social-Democratic Group in the Second Duma

This Social-Democratic group was not only numerically large, but outstandingly sound ideologically. It bore the hallmark of the revolution from which it sprang. Its pronouncements, in which there could still be heard the echoes of the great struggle that had involved the whole country, levelled deep and well-founded criticism, not only at the bills submitted to the Duma, but also at the whole tsarist and capitalist system of government in general.

The Social-Democratic Group in the Second Duma, Lenin. (https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1911/nov/00.htm) 1911.

For four years our deputies have been languishing in chains in terrible Russian prisons, the severity and savagery of which you are, of course, aware. Many have already died there. One of the deputies has lost his reason, the health of many others, as a result of unendurable living conditions, has been impaired and they may die any day. The Russian proletariat can no longer calmly look on while its representatives, whose only crime is that they waged an unremitting struggle in its interests, perish in tsarist prisons. It is even more impossible for it to look on calmly, since from the legal point of view Brodsky’s admissions provide complete justification for demanding a fresh trial. A campaign for the release of the deputies has already commenced in Russia.

The Social-Democratic Group in the Second Duma, Lenin. (https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1911/nov/00.htm) 1911.

The Third Duma and Social-Democracy by Lenin

¨Such are the main tasks of the Social-Democrats in the Third Duma. Our comrades have some hard work to do. They will be there among enemies, malicious and ruthless. Efforts will be made to stop their mouths, and they will be showered with abuse, they will perhaps be expelled from the Duma, brought to trial, thrown into prison and exiled. They must be firm, in spite of all persecutions, they must hold high the proletariat’s red banner and remain loyal to the end to the great cause of struggle for the people’s emancipation. And all of us, comrades workers, must join forces in supporting them; we must lend a sensitive ear to their every word, respond to it, discuss their acts at meetings and rallies, reinforcing by our sympathies and approval their every correct step, helping them with all our strength and resources in the struggle for the cause of the revolution. Let the working class be united in supporting its spokesmen, and in so doing may it strengthen its unity which it needs in the great struggler—the time when the “last decisive battle” is fought.¨

The Third Duma and Social-Democracy, Lenin. (https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1907/nov/00b.htm) 1907

The Fourth Duma Election Campaign and the Tasks of the Revolutionary Social-Democrats

The crisis is growing in a new situation. The reactionary Duma,^[3] which provides the landlords with power, the bourgeoisie with an arena for making deals, and the proletariat with a small platform, is a necessary factor in this situation. We need this platform, we need the election campaign, for our revolutionary work among the masses. We need the illegal Party to direct all this work as a whole—in the Taurida Palace, as well as in Kazanskaya Square,^[4] at workers’ mass meetings, during strikes, at district meetings of worker Social-Democrats, and at open trade union meetings.

The Fourth Duma Election Campaign and the Tasks of the Revolutionary Social-Democrats, Lenin. (https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1912/may/08.htm#fwV18E003) 1912