21
THE FOURTH DUMA ELECTION CAMPAIGN
the Rights—the mere slogan of support for the Progressists
is no good. Our job is to promote the democratic upswing,
to foster the new revolutionary democracy that is growing
in a new way in the new Russia. Unless it succeeds in
gathering strength and winning in spite of the liberals, no
“triumph” of the Progressists and the Cadets in the elections
will bring about any serious change in the actual situation
in Russia.
The democratic upswing is an indisputable fact now.
It is progressing with greater difficulty, at a slower pace and
along a more arduous path than we should like, but it is
progressing nonetheless. It is this that we must “support”
and promote by our election work and every other kind of
activity. Our task is to organise the revolutionary demo-
crats—by ruthless criticism of Narodnik liquidationism and
Narodnik otzovism to forge a republican peasant party—
but first of all and above all else to clean “our own house”
of liquidationism and otzovism, intensify our revolutionary
Social-Democratic work among the proletariat and strength-
en the illegal Social-Democratic Labour Party. The out-
come of the growing revolutionary crisis does not depend
on us; it depends on a thousand different causes, on the revo-
lution in Asia and on socialism in Europe. But it does depend
on us to conduct consistent and steady work among the
masses in the spirit of Marxism, and only this kind of work
is never done in vain.
Sotsial-Demokrat No. 2 6 ,
Published according
May 8 (April 2 5 ), 1 9 1 2
to the text in Sotsial-Demokrat
22
THE LIQUIDATORS AGAINST THE PARTY
The liquidators of all shades, writing in the legal Russia
press, are conducting a campaign of slander against the Par-
ty Conference
16
with an easy shamelessness which might well
be envied by the Bulgarins and Burenins.
17
The articles in
Zhivoye Dyelo, which openly question the delegates as
to who sent them and, under the protection of the censor-
ship, attack what cannot be defended in the legal press,
exemplify such disregard for the elementary rules of literary
decency that they are bound not only to evoke protests
from the adherents of the Conference, but also to disgust
any fair-minded political leader. As for the articles of the
anonymous informer of Vorwärts,
18
they reek of shameless
braggadocio and florid lying so overpoweringly as not to
permit of any doubt that the liquidators’ order for them
found itself in experienced hands.
*
Driven into a corner, the groups and circles of liquidators
do not confine themselves, however, to a campaign of slan-
der against the Party. They are trying to convene a confer-
ence of their own. Every measure has been taken, of course,
to lend the Organising Committee,
19
which is to convene this
conference, the semblance of a “pro-Party”, “non-factional”,
“unity” body. After all, these are such convenient words—
when the liquidators want to hook all those who for some
reason are dissatisfied with the Party Conference. Trotsky
*
To acquaint the German comrades with the actual state of affairs
in the R.S.D.L.P., the editorial board of the Central Organ pub-
lished a special pamphlet in German, exposing, among other things,
the methods of the anonymous writer in Vorwärts. (See present edition
Vol. 17, pp. 533-46.—Ed.
23
THE LIQUIDATORS AGAINST THE PARTY
was entrusted with singing all the virtues of the Organising
Committee and of the forthcoming liquidationist conference;
nor could they have assigned the job to anyone fitter than
the “professional uniter”. And he did sing them—in every
variety of type his Vienna printer could find: “The support-
ers of Vperyod and Golos, pro-Party Bolsheviks, pro-Party
Mensheviks,
2 0
so-called liquidators and non-factionalists—
in Russia and abroad—are firmly supporting the work. . . ”
of the Organising Committee. (Pravda
21
No. 24.)
The poor fellow—again he told a lie, and again he miscal-
culated. The bloc under the hegemony of the liquidators,
which was being prepared in opposition to the Conference
of 1912 with so much fuss, is now bursting at the seams and
the reason is that the liquidators have shown their hand too
openly. The Poles refused to take part in the Organising
Committee. Plekhanov, through correspondence with a
representative of the Committee, established several interest-
ing details, to wit: (1) that what is planned is a “constitu-
ent” conference, i.e., not a conference of the R.S.D.L.P.,
but of some new party; (2) that it is being convened on “anar-
chical” lines; (3) that the “conference is being convened
by the liquidators”. After these circumstances had been
revealed by Comrade Plekhanov, there was nothing surpris-
ing to us in the fact that the so-called Bolshevik (?!) conci-
liators plucked up courage and resolved to convict Trotsky
of—having told a lie by listing them among the supporters
of the Organising Committee. “This Organising Committee,
as it is now constituted, with its obvious tendency to im-
pose upon the whole Party its own attitude to the liquida-
tors, and with the principles of organisational anarchy which
it has made the basis for increasing its membership, does
not provide the least guarantee that a really general Party
conference will be convened.” That is how our emboldened
“pro-Party” people comment on the Organising Committee
today. We do not know where the most Leftist of our Left—
the Vperyod group, who at one time hastened to signify its
sympathy with the Organising Committee—stand today.
Nor is this of any importance. The important thing is that
the liquidationist character of the conference to be held by
the Organising Committee has been established by Ple-
khanov with irrefutable clarity, and that the statesmanlike