Let us present a small selection of the expletives and exclamations that Rabocheye Dyelo hurled at us. “It is not a newspaper that can create a party organisation, but vice versa.” A newspaper, standing above the party, outside of its control, and independent of it, thanks to its having its own staff of agents. “By what miracle has Iskra forgotten about the actually existing Social-Democratic organisations of the party to which it belongs?” “Those who possess firm principles and a corresponding plan are the supreme regulators of the real struggle of the party and dictate to it their plan…” “The plan drives our active and virile organisations into the kingdom of shadows and desires to call into being a fantastic network of agents…” “Were Iskra’s plan carried into effect, every trace of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, which is taking shape, would be obliterated…” “A propagandist organ becomes an uncontrolled autocratic law-maker for the entire practical revolutionary struggle…” “How should our Party react to the suggestion that it be completely subordinated to an autonomous editorial board?”, etc., etc.

As the reader can see from the contents and the tone of these above quotations, Rabocheye Dyelo has taken offence. Offence, not for its own sake, but for the sake of the organisations and committees of our Party, which it alleges Iskra desires to drive into the kingdom of shadows and whose very traces it would obliterate. How terrible! But a curious thing should be noted. The article ‘Where to Begin?’ appeared in May 1901. The articles in Rabocheye Dyelo appeared in September 1901. Now we are in mid-January 1902. During these five months (prior to and after September), not a single committee and not a single organisation of the Party protested formally against this monster that seeks to drive them into the kingdom of shadows; and yet scores and hundreds of communications from all parts of Russia have appeared during this period in Iskra, as well as in numerous local and non-local publications. How could it happen that those who would be driven into the realm of shadows are not aware of it and have not taken offence, though a third party has?

The explanation is that the committees and other organisations are engaged in real work and are not playing at ‘democracy’. The committees read the article ‘Where to Begin?’, saw that it represented an attempt “to elaborate a definite plan for an organisation, so that its formation may be undertaken from all aspects”; and since they knew and saw very well that not one of these ‘sides’ would dream of “setting about to build it” until it was convinced of its necessity, and of the correctness of the architectural plan, it has naturally never occurred to them to take offence at the boldness of the people who said in Iskra: “In view of the pressing importance of the question we, on our part, take the liberty of submitting to the comrades a skeleton plan to be developed in greater detail in a pamphlet now in preparation for the print.” With a conscientious approach to the work, was it possible to view things otherwise than that if the comrades accepted the plan submitted to them, they would carry it out, not because they are ‘subordinate’, but because they would be convinced of its necessity for our common cause, and that if they did not accept it, then the ‘skeleton’ (a pretentious word, is it not?) would remain merely a skeleton? Is it not demagogy to fight against the skeleton of a plan, not only by ‘picking it to pieces’ and advising comrades to reject it, but by inciting people inexperienced in revolutionary matters against its authors merely on the grounds that they dare to ‘legislate’ and come out as the ‘supreme regulators’, i.e., because they dare to propose an outline of a plan? Can our Party develop and make progress if an attempt to raise local functionaries to broader views, tasks, plans, etc., is objected to, not only with the claim that these views are erroneous, but on the grounds that the very ‘desire’ to ‘raise’ us gives ‘offence’? Nadezhdin, too, ‘picked’ our plan ‘to pieces’, but he did not sink to such demagogy as cannot be explained solely by naivety or by primitiveness of political views. From the outset, he emphatically rejected the charge that we intended to establish an ‘inspectorship over the Party’. That is why Nadezhdin’s criticism of the plan can and should be answered on its merits, while Rabocheye Dyelo deserves only to be treated with contempt.

But contempt for a writer who sinks so low as to shout about autocracy and ‘subordination’ does not relieve us of the duty of disentangling the confusion that such people create in the minds of their readers. Here we can clearly demonstrate to the world the nature of catchwords like ‘broad democracy’. We are accused of forgetting the committees, of desiring or attempting to drive them into the kingdom of shadows, etc. How can we reply to these charges when, out of considerations of secrecy, we can give the reader almost no facts regarding our real relationships with the committees? Persons hurling vehement accusations calculated to provoke the crowd prove to be ahead of us because of their brazenness and their disregard of the duty of a revolutionary to conceal carefully from the eyes of the world the relationships and contacts which he maintains, which he is establishing or trying to establish. Naturally, we refuse once and for all to compete with such people in the field of ‘democratism’. As to the reader who is not initiated in all Party affairs, the only way in which we can discharge our duty to him is to acquaint him, not with what is and what is im Werden but with a particle of what has taken place and what may be told as a thing of the past.

The Bund hints that we are “impostors”[1]; the Union Abroad accuses us of attempting to obliterate all traces of the Party. Gentlemen, you will get complete satisfaction when we relate to the public four facts concerning the past.

First fact.[2] The members of one of the Leagues of Struggle, who took a direct part in founding our Party and in sending a delegate to the Inaugural Party Congress, reached agreement with a member of the Iskra group regarding the publication of a series of books for workers that were to serve the entire movement. The attempt to publish the series failed and the pamphlets written for it, The Tasks of the Russian Social-Democrats and The New Factory Law, by a circuitous course and through the medium of third parties, found their way abroad, where they were published.[3]

Second fact. Members of the Central Committee of the Bund approached a member of the Iskra group with the proposal to organise what the Bund then described as a “literary laboratory”. In making the proposal, they stated that unless this was done, the movement would greatly retrogress. The result of these negotiations was the appearance of the pamphlet The Working-Class Cause in Russia.[4]

Third fact. The Central Committee of the Bund, via a provincial town, approached a member of the Iskra group with the proposal that he undertake the editing of the revived Rabochaya Gazeta and, of course, obtained his consent. The offer was later modified: the comrade in question was invited to act as a contributor, in view of a new plan for the composition of the Editorial Board. Also this proposal, of course, obtained his consent.[5] Articles were sent (which we managed to preserve): ‘Our Programme’ which was a direct protest against Bernsteinism, against the change in the line of the legal literature and of Rabochaya Mysl; ‘Our Immediate Task’ (“to publish a Party organ that shall appear regularly and have close contacts with all the local groups”, the drawbacks of the prevailing “amateurism”), ‘An Urgent Question’ (an examination of the objection that it is necessary first to develop the activities of local groups before undertaking the publication of a common organ; an insistence on the paramount importance of a “revolutionary organisation” and on the necessity of “developing organisation, discipline, and the technique of secrecy to the highest degree of perfection”). The proposal to resume publication of Rabochaya Gazeta was not carried out, and the articles were not published.

Fourth fact. A member of the committee that was organising the second regular congress of our Party communicated to a member of the Iskra group the programme of the congress and proposed that group as editorial board of the revived Rabochaya Gazeta. This preliminary step, as it were, was later sanctioned by the committee to which this member belonged, and by the Central Committee of the Bund.[6] The Iskra group was notified of the place and time of the congress and (uncertain of being able, for certain reasons, to send a delegate) drew up a written report for the congress. In the report, the idea was suggested that the mere election of a Central Committee would not only fail to solve the question of unification at a time of such complete disorder as the present, but would even compromise the grand idea of establishing a party, in the event of an early, swift, and thorough police round-up, which was more than likely in view of the prevailing lack of secrecy; that therefore, a beginning should be made by inviting all committees and all other organisations to support the revived common organ, which would establish real contacts between all the committees and really train a group of leaders for the entire movement; and that the committees and the Party would very easily be able to transform such a group into a Central Committee as soon as the group had grown and become strong. In consequence of a number of police raids and arrests, however, the congress could not take place. For security reasons the report was destroyed, having been read only by a few comrades, including the representatives of one committee.

Let the reader now judge for himself the character of the methods employed by the Bund in hinting that we were impostors, or by Rabocheye Dyelo, which accuses us of trying to relegate the committees to the kingdom of shadows and to ‘substitute’ for the organisation of a party an organisation disseminating the ideas advocated by a single newspaper. It was to the committees, on their repeated invitation, that we reported on the necessity for adopting a definite plan of concerted activities. It was precisely for the Party organisation that we elaborated this plan, in articles sent to Rabochaya Gazeta, and in the report to the Party congress, again on the invitation of those who held such an influential position in the Party that they took the initiative in its (actual) restoration. Only after the twice repeated attempts of the Party organisation, in conjunction with ourselves, officially to revive the central organ of the Party had failed, did we consider it our bounden duty to publish an unofficial organ, in order that with the third attempt the comrades might have before them the results of experience and not merely conjectural proposals. Now certain results of this experience are present for all to see, and all comrades may now judge whether we properly understood our duties and what should be thought of people that strive to mislead those unacquainted with the immediate past, simply because they are piqued at our having pointed out to some their inconsistency on the ‘national’ question, and to others the inadmissibility of their vacillation in matters of principle.

  1. Iskra, No. 8. The reply of the Central Committee of the General Jewish Union of Russia and Poland to our article on the national question.

  2. We deliberately refrain from relating these facts in the sequence of their occurrence.

  3. The reference is to the negotiations between the St. Petersburg League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class and Lenin who, in the second half of 1897, wrote the two pamphlets mentioned.

  4. The author requests me to state that, like his previous pamphlets, this one was sent to the Union Abroad on the assumption that its publications were edited by the Emancipation of Labour group (owing to certain circumstances, he could not then – February 1899 – know of the change in editorship). The pamphlet will be republished by the League at an early date.

  5. The reference is to the negotiations between Lenin and the Central Committee of the Bund. –Ed.

  6. The ‘fourth fact’ of which Lenin speaks was the attempt of the Union of Russian Social-Democrats Abroad and the Bund to convene the Second Congress of the R.S.D.L.P. in the spring of 1900. The “member of the committee” referred to was I.H. Lalayants (a member of the Ekaterinoslav Social-Democratic Committee) who came to Moscow in February 1900 for talks with Lenin. –Ed.