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69 (Tchernoff and Natanson), sitting together with them in Zimmerwald and Kienthal, and issuing manifestoes in common; but we never ceased and never slackened our ideologico-political fight with the "Kautskians," Martoff and Tchernoff (Natanson died in 1919, quite near to us, being a "Revolutionary Communist"—Narodnik—and almost agreeing with us.) At the very moment of the October Revolution we effected an informal (a very important and highly successful) political bloc with the petit bourgeois peasantry, having accepted fully, without a single change, the "Socialist Revolutionary" agrarian program—that is, we effected an undeniable compromise, in order to prove to the peasants that we do not want to dominate them, but to come to an understanding with them. At the same time we proposed, and soon realized, a formal political bloc with the "Left Socialist Revolutionaries," involving working together in the same Government. They broke up this bloc after the conclusion of the Brest Peace, and then went as far as an armed insurrection against us in July, 1918. Subsequently they began an armed struggle against us.

It is therefore comprehensible why all the attacks made by the German "Left" upon the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Germany (because the latter entertained the idea of a bloc with the "Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany," the Kautskians) seem to us not at all serious, and prove to us the palpable error of the "Left." We in Russia also had Right Mensheviks (who participated in the Kerensky Government and who correspond to the German Scheidemanns) and Left Mensheviks (Martoff) who were in opposition to the Right Wing, and who correspond to the German Kautskians. We clearly observed, in 1917, how the working masses were gradually abandoning the Mensheviks to come over to the Bolsheviks. At the first All-Russian Congress of Soviets, in June, 1917, we had only 13%; the majority of votes were for the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks. At the Second Congress of Soviets (October 25, 1917—old style) we had 51%. Why, in Germany, did a wholly similar movement of the workers from Right to Left first strengthen, not the Communists, but the intermediate