Page:Karl Kautsky - Georgia - tr. Henry James Stenning (1921).pdf/22

 and from this point they tended to move farther away from the Marxian method towards the: pre-Marxian ideas of Blanqui and Weitling. The more the members of this section deviated from Marxian methods, the more obstinately they clung to Marxian phrases the better to exploit the repute in which the name of Marx was held in Russia, and they expended all their energies upon learning by heart such phrases as suited them, which they interpreted in their own way. In place of Marxian science they set up Marxian scholastics.

In the early days of this split, which occurred in 1903, the Georgian Social Democrats ranged themselves on the side that was dominated by the Marxian and Western European outlook, that is, on the side of the Mensheviks.

They soon became the strongest element in this section, to which they remained absolutely loyal. In Russia, on the other hand, there were constant fluctuations in the relative strength of the Menshevists and the Bolshevists. Yet the general tendency of the Russian proletarian movement showed itself to be very favourable to Bolshevism. Certainly the Bolshevists were the worst Marxians, but their preponderance was to be explained on Marxist lines by the special conditions in which the class struggle was carried on in Russia. In Georgia, and also in Poland, which stood in national opposition to Russia, the special Russian form of Marxism found no foothold. The Georgian Social-Democrats were the picked troops of Russian Menshevism. Consequently, from the commencement Georgia appeared to Bolshevism as the enemy deserving the most bitter hatred, and to-day it has become the hereditary enemy. After the first Russian Revolution, Georgia was the country which constantly returned the largest Menshevist majority in the Duma Elections since 1906, and which furnished many of the Menshevist martyrs.

Scarcely one of the leading comrades in Tiflis whom