Page:Lenin - What Is To Be Done - tr. Joe Fineberg (1929).pdf/150

 establish real contacts between all the committees and really train a group of leaders to lead the whole movement; that the committees and the party could very easily transform this group into a central committee as soon as the group had grown and become strong. The congress, however, never took place owing to a number of police raids and arrests; for reasons of secrecy, the report was destroyed, having been read only by several comrades including the representatives of one committee.

Let the reader now judge for himself the character of the methods employed by the Bund in hinting that we were pretenders, or by Rabocheye Dyelo, who accuses us of trying to relegate the committees to the kingdom of shadows, and to "substitute" an organisation for advocating the idea of a single newspaper for the organisation of a party. Yes, we did report to the committees, on their repeated invitation, on the necessity for accepting a definite plan of work in common. It was precisely for the party organisations that we drew up this plan, in articles published in Rabochaya Gazeta, and in the report to the party congress, again on the invitation of those who occupied such an influential position in the party that they took the initiative in its (actual) revival. And only after the two-fold attempt of the party organisation, in conjunction with ourselves, to revive the central organ of the party officially had failed, did we think it our bounden duty to publish an unofficial organ, in order that with this third attempt the comrades may have before them the results of an experiment and not merely problematical proposals. Now certain results of this experiment are available to the view of all, and all comrades may now judge as to whether we properly understood our duties, and what must be thought of people who strive to mislead those who are unacquainted with the immediate past, simply because they are chagrined at our having proved to some their inconsistency on the "national" question, and to others the inadmissibility of their waverings in matters of principle.

The main points in the article "Where to Begin" deal precisely with this question, and reply to it positively. As far as we know, the only attempt to examine this question and to reply to it in the