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Special pages :
Letter to the Bureau Aboard of the Central Commitee, RSDLP, April 5, 1910
Published: First published in 1964 in Collected Works, Fifth (Russian) Ed., Vol. 47. Printed from a hectographed copy of the original.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1977, Moscow, Volume 43, pages 235b-242.
Dear Comrades,
Our inquiry as to how you understand your competence in matters concerning conflicts in the Central Organ has not yet been answered. Nevertheless we consider it necessary to offer you some explanation with regard to a number of conflicts that have occurred in the new Editorial Board of the C.0. since the plenumâas we propose to do in the near future for the information of the whole Party and all Social-Democrats.
We shall begin with the last statement of Comrades Dan and Martov of March 29.
1. It is not true that we decided to publish the article from Tiflis âcontaining violent attacks on the Caucasian Regional Committeeâ, for it had been decided to omit that section of the article and leave only the polemics on points of principle with the Georgian newspaper which the author, a local functionary, charges with liquidationism. The authors of the statement, moreover, conceal from you the fact that the manuscript of this polemical article was sent to the author of the Georgian article in order to give him an opportunity to reply in the same issue of the C.0. (Later on, at the last meeting of the Editorial Board, we decided to turn over the whole polemic together with the reply to Diskussionny Listok.[1] )
2. The authors of the statement conceal from you why we rejected Comrade Danâs article on the tasks of the Party with regard to the persecution of the trade unions. We rejected it because the âtasks of the Party in this article are reduced to exchanging the struggle to overthrow the autocracy for the petty cash of Cadet âstruggle for legalityââ.
3. Comrades Dan and Martov consider it âunnaturalâ for us to have conferred separately on how to rebuff the base attacks on the C.0. and on the unity of the Party, while considering it âperfectly naturalâ that they them selves, two editors of the C.0., should have met with other editors of Golos Sotsial-Demokrata in order to launch a foul attack on the CO[2] A conference of like-minded people within a collegium and joint discussion of an article before laying it on the editorial desk for final judgement (moreover, in a case such as the given one), they consider to be a violation of the law. But to be a member of the Editorial Board of the CO, entrusted by the CC, among other things, with the task of âexplaining the danger of deviationsâ towards liquidationism . and otzovism, and at the same time a member of the Editorial Board of Golos Sotsial-Demokrata, which shields, encourages and defends liquidationism and with regard to which the CC has spoken of the need to terminate its existenceâthis they do not consider incompatible with political integrity. This habit of stabbing the Central Organ and Party unity in the back while at the same time demanding âcollegialityâ in drafting a reply to the back-stabbing they themselves have dealt, a habit characteristic of underground manipulators, we leave to the authors of the statement. To discuss with them their own attacks against the Central Organ would have been an undignified farce on our part. The only thing We could do was to lay the article on the editorial desk in order to give them a chance to acquaint themselves with its contents and to hear their objections. That is what was done.
4. The authors of the statement write that we âdirectly deceivedâ them, for âno mention was made of any intention to publishâand with shocking distortion of the truth to bootâpart of the correspondence between members of the CC and the CC Bureau Abroadâ. Not only did we not mention this to them, we made no mention of the contents of the article in general, for the simple reason that we gave the article to them. Comrade Dan actually looked through the manuscript. This is indeed deception on the part of Dan and Martov, who expected that you would not notice that a few lines earlier they write that we gave theta the article to read in the manuscript, in other words, had no intention to conceal anything from them. In order to show what our âshocking distortion of the truthâ consists in, we are printing in No. 12 of the Central Organ all relevant excerpts from the CC letter. The reader will be able to judge for himself.
5. The authors of the statement write about the âsecrecy aspect of the matterâ. But they forget to tell you that we did not disclose in the press the place occupied in the Party organisation by the three liquidators, that Dan and Martov themselves published not only their names but also those of other liquidators in Nos. 19â20 of Golos Sotsial-Demokrata. As for us, we can only reply to this in the words of Plekhanov that the only thing that âthreatensâ liquidators of the Party is âan order of merit round the neckâ.
6. The authors of the statement write that Bolsheviks too refuse to go into the CC[3] But they deliberately forget to tell you that it is not a matter of who wants or does not want to enter the CC but of who considers the CC and the Party unnecessary and harmful.
7. The authors of the statement complain that their articles have been rejected. But all these complaints have only one object: artificially to create the grounds for the existence of Golos Sotsial-Demokrata. For this reason the authors of the statement are boycotting âDiskussionny Listokâ, in which their articles could be freely printed. They are deliberately wrecking this Party publication, too, whose purpose it is to obviate the need for factional organs, to enable all trends in the Party freely to express themselves whenever their views differ from those of the Central Organ. For example, we suggested that Comrade Martovâs article âOn the Right Pathâ be printed either in the Central Organ with an editorial comment (since the article challenges CC decisions) or in Diskussionny Listok. The first of these alternatives was called giving the article a âgendarmeâ escort, and the second, âexilingâ it. And we were literally told: ânow we shall open hostilities against you.â
8. The authors of the statement complain that we print ed an article about the conference which they allege âcompletely distorts the decisions of the plenary meeting on this questionâ. What lies behind this complaint is this: the article in question wholly agrees with the CC letter on the conference,[4] and the anti-liquidationist letter of the CC about the conference is not to the taste of the extreme liquidator Dan. The article was written by the comrade who wrote the CC letter. And Comrade Martov signed the CC letter. It was adopted unanimously. When he sent the proofs to the author of the letter, Comrade Martov wrote: âI have no objections to your text of the letter about the conference.â But now, before the liquidationist cock has had time to crow thrice, L. Martov hastens (together with Dan) to disavow the letter he himself accepted. The statement of ... written by Dan and signed also by Martov naĂŻvely reveals the real cause of the dissatisfaction of the Golos people with the CC letter on the conference and with our article on the same subject: the plenary meeting, it appears, allegedly decided to âreconcileâ the Party with the âso-called liquidationismâ and to âfill in the gulfâ between the liquidators and the Party. But the Central Organ is not carrying out this task. We confess that we are doing the exact opposite. What is surprising is only this: why did the authors of the statement complaining about the rejection of articles themselves reject in Golos Sotsial-Demokrata an article signed among others by Comrade Martov, namely, the âLetter of the CCâ concerning the conference? Why did they not reprint it either in full or at least in part? Probably because the CC letter âcompletely distorts the decisionsâ of the Central Committee.
9. The authors of the statement have the audacity to turn to you, the Central Committee Bureau Abroad, with a demand for âsatisfactionâ for the unpleasantness caused them by the exposure of the three practical liquidators. They evidently believe that you might agree not to bring into the light of day the monstrous outrage against our Party committed by their associates Mikhail, Roman and Yuri. They evidently ascribe to you the intention of concealing from the Party the conspiracy against the Party which we exposed and which a member of the CC in his letter from Russia asked you to make public. We of course leave it to you to give an appropriate reply to such an insult to your Party conscience. We on our part believe that no Party body will venture to side with the Romans, Yuris, Mikhails and their accomplices to any extent or in any way, not even indirectly. Such individuals and bodies should be pilloried without delay and openly in the name of the entire Party. We in the Central Organ of our Party, where we have been placed by the will of the plenum, shall unswervingly pursue this line. The same fate will befall anyone who throws in his lot with those who would destroy the Partyâwhoever he may be.
10. The authors end their statement by threatening you that if you do not do as they wish they will set about exposing cases that were closed by the plenary meeting of the CC And this they promise to do despite the CC decision. But this threat is no longer an instance of the usual fraktioneller Dreck,[5] as the representative of Latvian Social-Democracy put it at the plenary meeting of the CC referring to the way the Golos people had seized on these issues for the sake of factional muck; it is downright factional blackmail with regard to the CC Bureau Abroad. And, of course, we leave it to you, comrades, to deal worthily with these blackmailers operating with factional muck.
But we refuse to go into all the falsifications, distortions of facts and downright lies amassed against us in the statements, complaints and protests of Martov and Dan. You yourselves, comrades, will unquestionably be able to get to the bottom of all this factional muck, although we do not doubt that it will evoke in you the same natural feeling of revulsion it has aroused in us. Nevertheless we would like in conclusion to draw your attention to two things.
First. We should like to remind you that the present attempt of the Golos people to disrupt the CC is not the first. As far back as the summer of 1908, when the Bolshevik members of the CC were arrested, the Golos people made a valiant attempt of this kind which was exposed at the plenary meeting of the CC (in August 1908). At that time the Golos people proposed to the Bund comrades to join in a conspiracy to disrupt the CC But a member of the CC of the Bund (Comrade E.) informed of this a Bolshevik member of the CC (Comrade G.) who had just been released from prison, and the conspiracy failed. We still have on file the letter from the member of the Bund CC in which he writes that the Golos leaders deny the CC its very âExistenzrecktâ (right to exist) and propose replacing it with some sort of information bureau.[6] The fact that the proposal to betray the Party was made by the Golos people in the CC to the Bund CC was confirmed also by other comrades from the Bund at the December (1908) conference (see the minutes of the conference). Add to this the recent exposure by the Menshevik comrades Alexei Moskovsky and G. V. Plekhanov, and also the fact that Golos Sotsial-Demokrata has not once come out against the liquidators, but, on the contrary, constantly defends them, demanding that they now be recognised on a par with the Party, and even takes up the cudgels for Roman, Mikhail and Yuri, and you will have a pretty clear picture of the prolonged, indefatigable, stubborn and most insidious attempts of all kinds by which the liquidators are seeking to achieve their purposeâto wreck the Party. At the same time the danger of the liquidationist trend and the need to fight it most vigorously will become obvious even to the blind. In view of this we believe that now is the time to publish also the letter of the Bund CC member Comrade E. and in general all the facts relative to the attempts to liquidate the Party.
Second. If the two Golos menâour colleagues on the Central Organâwrite you that âa minimum of respect for the Party should have obligedâ us âto relinquish, our responsible Party positionsâ, we believe that common political decency and a minimum of self-respect should have induced them to abandon the false position they adopt in the Party and in the Central Organ by coming out simultaneously in defence of the liquidators. Incidentally, as distinct from them, we are not at all inclined to ascribe evil intentions to them as individuals. The lies, the black mail threats and all their other virtues spring not from their ill will, hut from their false position which compels them to breed falsehood at every step. Es ist der Fluch der bösen Tat, dass sie immer Böses muss gebĂ€hren.[7] And the curse of their misdeed consists precisely in that they simultaneously occupy seats in the Party organ and in the organ which is out to liquidate the Party, with the result that they assume the contradictory mission of standing both for the Party and against it. For this reason they do not even have the âcourageâ of the Romans, the Yuris and the Mikhails. This position of theirs is compatible neither with common political decency nor with a minimum of self-respect. This is what creates that false position, that, so to speak, peculiar brand of Azefism[8] for liquidationist purposes, which impels them, with the best of intentions, toward the most unworthy actions.
Members of the Editorial Board
of the Central Organ A. Var
G. Zinoviev
N. Lenin
April 5, 1910
P.S. For the time being, we are sending a copy of this statement at once only to the Russian collegium of the CC, the ânationalâ CCs and our Party press.
- â A reference to an article by J. V. Stalin, âLetter from the Caucasusâ.âEd.
- â A reference to publication by the Editorial Board of Golos Sotsial Demokrata in February 1910 in Paris of a leaflet entitled âLetter to the Comradesâ and signed by Axelrod, Dan, Martov and Martynov. The authors of the leaflet charged the paper Sotsial-Demokrat with having become an affiliate of Proletary and declared their intention to continue publishing Golos Sotsial-Demokrata. Lenin analysed this document and gave it a political appraisal in the articles âGolos (Voice) of the Liquidators Against the Party (Reply to Golos Sotsial-Demokrata)â and âParty Unity Abroadâ (see present edition, Vol. 16, pp. 156â64 and 185â89).
- â Here the authors of the statement indignantly say that the âreaders of the article are likewise not told that the Polish Social-Democrats to this day have not been able to find anybody who would agree to represent them in the CCâ More, they have the temerity to underline these words. This is just as foul a lie as the other allegations in the statement. Just as the Polish Social-Democrats had their representative in the CC before the plenary meeting, so they have one now, after it, who is waiting for word when to attend the CC meeting. Already a week ago the Polish CC member received a letter from his colleague in Moscow to the effect that he still has to wait, for the CC cannot be convened as yet. âLenin
- â Sotsial-Demokrat No. 12 carried an unsigned article âOn the Party Conferenceâ. The letter referred to, âTo the Party Organisations (on the Coming Party Conference)â, was written by a commission consisting of G. Y. Zinoviev, I. F. Dubrovinsky and Y. 0. Martov.
- â Factional muck.âEd.
- â A reference to a letter from M. M. Rosen (Ezra), a member of the CC of the Bund, addressed to G. Y. Zinoviev.
- â The worst thing about evil is that it inevitably breeds evil (Schiller, Wallenstein. âDie Piccolominiâ, Act V, Scene 1).âEd.
- â Azefismâa synonym for political betrayal, from the name of E. F. Azef, a Socialist-Revolutionary leader who proved to be a secret police agent.