[...]
Permit me to say a few words on another point which is being very much discussed these days and on which we Russian Social-Democrats are particularly rich in experience, namely, the question of terrorism.
We have no information yet about the Austrian revolutionary Social-Democrats. We know that there are revolutionary Social-Democrats in Austria, but information about them is very meagre anyway. Consequently, we do not know whether the assassination of Stuergkh by Comrade Fritz Adler was the application of terrorism as tactics, THAT IS, systematic organization of political assassinations unconnected with the mass revolutionary struggle; or whether it was a single act in the transition from the opportunistic socialist defence of the fatherland tactics of the official Austrian Social-Democrats to the tactics of revolutionary mass struggle.
The latter assumption seems to fit in more with the circumstances. The message of greeting to Fritz Adler proposed by the Central Committee of the Italian party and published in Avanti! of October 29, therefore, deserves the fullest sympathy.
At all events, we are convinced that the experience of revolution and counter-revolution in Russia has proved the correctness of our Party's more than twenty-year struggle against terrorism as tactics. We must not forget, however, that this struggle was closely connected with a ruthless struggle against opportunism, which was inclined to repudiate the use of all violence by the oppressed classes against their oppressors. We have always stood for the use of violence in the mass struggle and in connection with it.
Secondly, we linked the struggle against terrorism with many years of propaganda, started long before December 1905, for an armed uprising. We have regarded the armed uprising not only as the best means by which the propletariat can retaliate to the government's policy, but also as the inevitable result of the development of the class struggle for socialism and democracy.
Thirdly, we have not confined ourselves to accepting violence in principle and to propaganda for armed uprising. For example, four years before the revolution we supported the use of violence by the masses against their oppressors, particularly in street demonstrations. We sought to bring to the whole country the lesson taught by every such demonstration. We began to devote more and more attention to organizing sustained and systematic mass resistance against the police and the army, to winning over, through this resistance, as large as possible a part of the army to the side of the proletariat in its struggle against the government, to inducing the peasantry and the army to take a conscious part in this struggle.
These are the tactics we have applied in the struggle against terrorism, and it is our firm conviction that they have proved successful.
Lenin, Complete Works, V. 23, pp. 122-124