Page:Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade (1920).pdf/84

 and propaganda, lies in the "accusation" of the proletarians of Europe that they were betraying the Russian revolution. Kautsky does not understand that owing to the censorship prevailing in Germany this "accusation" is almost the only form in which the German Socialists who have not betrayed Socialism, that is Liebknecht and his friends, could clothe their appeal to the German workers to throw off the Scheidemanns and the Kautskys, to emancipate themselves from their soporific and vulgar propaganda, to rise in spite of them and march over their heads towards revolution.

Kautsky does not understand all this. How is he to understand the policy of the Bolsheviks? Can one expect a person who is renouncing the revolution to weigh and to appraise the conditions of the development of the revolution in an exceedingly difficult case? The tactics of the Bolsheviks were correct; they were the only internationalist tactics since they were based not on the cowardly fear of a world revolution, not on a Philistine lack of faith in it, not on the narrow nationalist desire to protect "one's own" fatherland (that is, the fatherland of one's own bourgeoisie), and to snap one's fingers at all the rest, but on a correct (and universally admitted, before the war and before the treachery of the Social Chauvinists and Social Pacifists) estimation of the revolutionary situation in Europe. These tactics were the only internationalist tactics, because they contributed the maximum impetus possible for any single country to give to the development, maintenance and awakening of the revolution in all countries. These tactics have been justified by their enormous success because Bolshevism (not at all owing to the merits of the Russian Bolsheviks, but owing to the most profound sympathy of the masses with a policy which is revolutionary in practice) has become world-Bolshevism, and is giving to the world an idea, a theory, a programme, and a policy, which practically and concretely differ from those of Social-pacifism and Social