Page:Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade (1920).pdf/54

 bourgeois camp? (Let us observe, in passing, that in this respect also, Kautsky is merely treading in the footsteps of the Russian Mensheviks. There are among the Mensheviks any number of people who know all passages from Marx and Engels, but not one of them has attempted, between April and November, 1917, and between November, 1917, and November, 1918, to examine and to discuss the questlion of the Commune type of State. Plekhanoff, too, has avoided the question. Evidently discretion is the better part of his valor, too).

It goes without saying that to talk about the suppression of the Constituent Assembly with persons who call themselves Socialists and Marxists, but in practice desert to the bourgeoisie on the main question, on the question of the Commune type of State, would be tantamount to casting pearls before swine. It will be enough if I print in an appendix to the present pamphlet my thesis on the Constituent Assembly in full. The reader will then see that the subject was formulated by me on December 26th, 1917 (January 8th, 1918), both theoretically and historically and as a question of practical politics.

Although Kautsky, as a theoretician, has completely renounced Marxism, he nevertheless as an historian might have examined the question of the struggle of the Soviets with the Constituent Assembly. We know by many of the writings of Kautsky that he could be a Marxist historian and that these works of his will remain a permanent gift to the proletariat in spite of his subsequent apostasy. But on the given question Kautsky also renounces truth as a historian ignoring well-established facts and thus acting as a sycophant. He wanted to represent the Bolsheviks as a party without principles, and he tells the reader how they tried to soften the conflict with the Constituent Assemble before dispersing it. There is absolutely nothing in that procedure of which we ought to feel ashamed. I print my theses in full, and there I say quite plainly, addressing the timorous and