Page:Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade (1920).pdf/52

 public lecture in which I proclaimed the superiority of a Commune type of State over the bourgeois parliamentary republic. I afterwards repeatedly stated this in print, as, for instance, in a pamphlet on political parties, which was translated into English and was published in January, 1918, in the "New York Evening Post." Moreover, at the end of April, 1917, the Conference of the Bolshevik Party adopted a resolution to the effect that a proletarian and peasant republic was higher than a bourgeois parliamentary republic, that our party would not be satisfied with the latter, and that the programme of our party ought to be amended correspondingly.

In face of these facts, what name can be given to Kautsky's procedure in telling his German readers that I had passionately been demanding the convocation of a Constituent Assembly, and that I began to speak derogatorily of the dignity of the Constituent Assembly after the Bolsheviks had been left in a minority in it? How can one excuse such a procedure? Did not Kautsky know the facts? Then he should not have written about the matter at all. Why did he not honestly declare that he was writing on the strength of information supplied by the Mensheviks, by Stein, Axelrod and Co.? Kautsky obviously wants, by his pretence to be objective, to conceal his róle as the hand-maid of the defeated and disappointed Mensheviks.

However, these are only small things in comparison with what follows. Granted that Kautsky would not or could not obtain from his informants a translation of the Bolshevik resolutions and declarations on the question whether they were satisfied with a bourgeois parliamentary democratic republic or not. Let us grant this, although the thing is incredible. But surely he must have known my theses on December 26th, 1917 (January 8th, 1918), since he mentions them on page 30 of his book? Does he know them in full, or only such parts of them as have been translated for him by Stein, Axelrod, and Co.?