Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/160

 members of the Social-Democratic party there isn't a decent, conscious and revolutionary Social-Democrat who does not reject with indignation that "leader" who has been profusely defended by Sudekum and Scheidemann.

The proletarian masses who lost about nine-tenths of their leaders to the bourgeois camp, found themselves isolated and impotent before rampant chauvinism, military measures and the censorship. But the revolutionary situation created by the war and which is steadily becoming more acute and more widespread will unavoidably foster a revolutionary spirit which will stiffen up and enlighten the proletarians of the better type, the class conscious ones. There may and there probably will develop in the mentality of the masses a state of mind similar to that which we could observe in Russia at the beginning of 1905 at the time of the Gapon incident, when out of the backward proletarian masses, there grew in a few months or even a few weeks, an army of millions of men, the vanguard of the proletariat. We cannot tell whether a powerful revolutionary movement will start soon after this war or during this war, but it is only agitation conducted with that purpose which deserves to be called Socialist agitation. The only thing that will give that agitation a center and a direction, that will unite and blend all the elements the proletariat needs in its fight against its government and its bourgeoisie is a civil war.

In Russia the entire history of the labor movement has prepared the exclusion of the petit bourgeois opportunist elements from the revolutionary Social-Democratic elements. It is a very bad service to render to the labor movement to ignore that history and to declaim against "factionism." One thus deprives himself of the opportunity of understanding the actual growth of the labor movement in Russia, which has been for years and years waging a stubborn fight against all opportunistic tendencies.

Among all the great powers engaged in the war, Russia only has recently lived through a revolution; its bourgeois character, taking into account the decisive part played by the proletariat, could not but create a cleavage between the bourgeois and the proletarian elements in the labor party. In the twenty years from 1894 to 1914, during which the Russian Social Democracy existed as an organization, connected with the labor movement (we do not allude simply to the ideas current from 1883 to 1894) a struggle went on between the petit bourgeois opportunists and the proletarian revolutionary wing. The "economism" of the years 1894–1903 was nothing but opportunism. All its theories and arguments