Page:Lenin - What Is To Be Done - tr. Joe Fineberg (1929).pdf/22

 employ the same methods in the twilight of their political slavishness, and with an extremely original combination of "legal" with "illegal" activity, etc., etc. To talk about freedom of criticism and Bernsteinism as a condition for uniting the Russian Social-Democrats, and not to explain how Russian Bernsteinism has manifested itself, and what fruits it has borne, means to talk for the purpose of saying nothing.

We shall try, if only in a few words, to say what Rabocheye Dyelo did not want to say (or perhaps did not even understand).

The peculiar position of Russia in regard to the point we are examining is that right from the very beginning of the spontaneous labour movement on the one hand, and the change of progressive public opinion towards Marxism on the other, a combination was observed of obviously heterogeneous elements under a common flag for the purpose of fighting the common enemy (obsolete social and political views). We refer to the heyday of "legal Marxism." Speaking generally, this was an extremely curious phenomenon, that no one in the eighties, or the beginning of the nineties, would have believed possible. Suddenly, in a country ruled by an autocracy, in which the press is completely shackled, and in a period of intense political reaction in which even the tiniest outgrowth of political discontent and protest was suppressed, a censored literature springs up, advocating the theory of revolutionary Marxism, in a language extremely obscure, but understood by those "interested." The government had accustomed itself to regard only the theory of (revolutionary) Populism as dangerous without observing its internal evolution as is usually the case, and rejoicing at the criticism levelled against it no matter from what side it came. Quite a considerable time elapsed (according to our Russian calculations) before the government realised what had happened and the unwieldly army of censors and gendarmes discovered the new enemy and flung itself upon him. Meanwhile, Marxian hooks were published one after another, Marxian journals and newspapers were published, nearly every one became a Marxist, Marxism was flattered, the Marxists were courted and the book publishers rejoiced at the extraordinary ready sale of Marxian literature. It is quite reasonable to suppose that among the Marxian novices who were carried away by