Page:Lenin - The Collapse of the Second International - tr. Sirnis (1919).pdf/67

 only one which had performed systematic work amongst the masses during the last five or six years— in opposition to the revolutionary Marxist party of the working class—turned Socialist-Chauvinist when the war 1914-5 broke out! And this in a country where autocracy still exists, where a bourgeois revolution is far from being completed, where 43 per cent. of the (truly Russian) population oppressed the majority belonging to peoples of other nationalities. The European type of development under which certain strata of the lower middle class, especially the intellectuals and an insignificant portion of the aristocracy of Labour can "benefit by" the privileges derived from the position of "their" nation as a "Great Power"―could not help manifesting itself in Russia. The Russian working class and the Russian S.D. Labour Party have been prepared by the whole of their past history for "internationalist" tactics, that is to say, tactics which are consistently revolutionary.

P.S.―This sketch was already in type when Kautsky and Haase jointly with Bernstein published in the papers their manifesto. They had perceived that the masses were moving in the direction of the Left. Thus, these gentlemen are now ready to "make peace" with those of the Left at the price, of course, of keeping "peace" with the Suedekums. Indeed, they are "Maedchen fuer alle" (prostitutes)!