V. I. L E N I N
24
minds of the “conciliators” had to bow to this fact. Who
remains, then? The open liquidators and Trotsky.
The basis of this bloc is obvious: the liquidators enjoy
full freedom to pursue their line in Zhivoye Dyelo and Nasha
Zarya “as before”, while Trotsky, operating abroad, screens
them with r-r-revolutionary phrases, which cost him
nothing and do not bind them in any way.
There is one little lesson to be drawn from this affair by
those abroad who are sighing for unity, and who recently
hatched the sheet Za Partiyu
22
in Paris. To build up a
party, it is not enough to be able to shout “unity”; it is
also necessary to have a political programme, a programme
of political action. The bloc comprising the liquidators,
Trotsky, the Vperyod group, the Poles, the pro-Party Bol-
sheviks (?), the Paris Mensheviks, and so on and so forth,
was foredoomed to ignominious failure, because it was
based on an unprincipled approach, on hypocrisy and hol-
low phrases. As for those who sigh, it would not be amiss
if they finally made up their minds on that extremely com-
plicated and difficult question: With whom do they want
to have unity? If it is with the liquidators, why not say so
without mincing? But if they are against unity with the
liquidators, then what sort of unity are they sighing for?
The January Conference and the bodies it elected are the
only thing that actually unites all the R.S.D.L.P. functiona-
ries in Russia today. Apart from the Conference there is only
the promise of the Bundists
23
and Trotsky to convene the
liquidationist conference of the Organising Committee, and
the “conciliators” who are experiencing their liquidation-
ist hang-over.
Sotsial-Demokrat No. 2 6 ,
Published according
May 8 (April 2 5 ), 1 9 1 2
to the text in Sotsial-Demokrat
25
IN MEMORY OF HERZEN
One hundred years have elapsed since Herzen’s birth. The
whole of liberal Russia is paying homage to him, studiously
evading, however, the serious questions of socialism, and
taking pains to conceal that which distinguished Herzen the
revolutionary from a liberal. The Right-wing press, too, is
commemorating the Herzen centenary, falsely asserting that
in his last years Herzen renounced revolution. And in the
orations on Herzen that are made by the liberals and Narod-
niks abroad, phrase-mongering reigns supreme.
The working-class party should commemorate the Herzen
centenary, not for the sake of philistine glorification, but
for the purpose of making clear its own tasks and ascer-
taining the place actually held in history by this writer who
played a great part in paving the way for the Russian revo-
lution.
Herzen belonged to the generation of revolutionaries
among the nobility and landlords of the first half of the last
century. The nobility gave Russia the Birons and Arakche-
yevs,
24
innumerable “drunken officers, bullies, gamblers,
heroes of fairs, masters of hounds, roisterers, floggers,
pimps”, as well as amiable Manilovs.
25
“But,” wrote Her-
zen, “among them developed the men of December 14,
26
a phalanx of heroes reared, like Romulus and Remus, on
the milk of a wild beast. . . . They were veritable titans,
hammered out of pure steel from head to foot, comrades-
in-arms who deliberately went to certain death in order to
awaken the young generation to a new life and to purify the
children born in an environment of tyranny and servility.”
27
Herzen was one of those children. The uprising of the
Decembrists awakened and “purified” him. In the feudal
Russia of the forties of the nineteenth century, he rose to a
V. I. L E N I N
26
height which placed him on a level with the greatest think-
ers of his time. He assimilated Hegel’s dialectics. He realised
that it was “the algebra of revolution”. He went further
than Hegel, following Feuerbach to materialism. The first of
his Letters on the Study of Nature, “Empiricism and Ideal-
ism”, written in 1844, reveals to us a thinker who even now
stands head and shoulders above the multitude of modern
empiricist natural scientists and the host of present-day
idealist and semi-idealist philosophers. Herzen came right
up to dialectical materialism, and halted—before historical
materialism.
It was this “halt” that caused Herzen’s spiritual ship-
wreck after the defeat of the revolution of 1848. Herzen had
left Russia, and observed this revolution at close range.
He was at that time a democrat, a revolutionary, a socialist.
But his “socialism” was one of the countless forms and va-
rieties of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois socialism of the period
of 1848, which were dealt their death-blow in the June days
of that year. In point of fact, it was not socialism at all, but
so many sentimental phrases, benevolent visions, which were
the expression at that time of the revolutionary character of
the bourgeois democrats, as well as of the proletariat, which
had not yet freed itself from the influence of those democrats.
Herzen’s spiritual shipwreck, his deep scepticism and
pessimism after 1848, was a shipwreck of the bourgeois
illusions of socialism. Herzen’s spiritual drama was a pro-
duct and reflection of that epoch in world history when
the revolutionary character of the bourgeois democrats was
already passing away (in Europe), while the revolutionary
character of the socialist proletariat had not yet matured.
This is something the Russian knights of liberal verbiage,
who are now covering up their counter-revolutionary nature
by florid phrases about Herzen’s scepticism, did not and
could not understand. With these knights, who betrayed the
Russian revolution of 1905, and have even forgotten to think
of the great name of revolutionary, scepticism is a form of
transition from democracy to liberalism, to that toadying,
vile, foul and brutal liberalism which shot down the workers
in 1848, restored the shattered thrones and applauded Napo-
leon III, and which Herzen cursed, unable to understand its
class nature.
Dostları ilə paylaş: |