Published:
Pravda No. 83, April 10, 1913.
Signed: B..
Published according to the Pravda text.
Source:
Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
1977,
Moscow,
Volume 19,
page 52.
Translated: The Late George Hanna
Transcription\Markup:
R. Cymbala
Public Domain:
Lenin Internet Archive
(2004).
You may freely copy, distribute,
display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and
commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet
Archive” as your source.
At the evening sitting on April 2, the Octobrist L. G. Lyuts said, when objecting to the working-class deputies’ demand for a discussion of the question asked about the Lena events[1]:
“Two days from now will be the anniversary of the events on the Lena. Apparently the Social-Democrats are trying to budirovat the feelings of the workers in order to encourage excesses....”
The French word bouder, rendered in Russian by budirovat means to sulk, to pout. Mr. Lyuts, apparently, derives budirovat from budorazhit (excite) or, perhaps, vozbudit (in cite). How the bourgeois deputies and the bourgeois press laughed when a peasant in the First Duma used the foreign word “prerogatives” in the sense of barriers (“rogatki” in Russ.—Ed.)! The mistake was all the more pardonable since various prerogatives enjoyed by the ruling classes are actually barriers in Russian life. Mr. Lyuts’ educational attainments, however, did not “vozbudirovat” the laughter of his educated friends or their press.
[1] The reference is to the shooting of unarmed workers in the Lena Goldfields (Siberia) on April 4 (17), 1912.
News of the bloody drama in the Lena Goldfields aroused the wrath of the working class throughout Russia; there were street demonstrations, meetings and protest strikes all over the country. The Social-Democratic Duma group submitted a question to the tsarist government on the Lena shootings. The insolent answer given by the Tsar’s Minister Makarov: “So it has been, and so it will be in the future” served to increase the indignation of the workers. Up to 300,000 workers took part in strikes of protest against the Lena shootings. The strikes merged with the May Day strikes in which 400,000 workers took part.
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