Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/367

Rh pendent upon cultured leaders. The fact that among Russian operatives the great majority are uneducated, suffices per se to make the instructed workers into an aristocracy.

The struggle between the centralists and the autonomists within the Russian social democracy is thus based upon the nature of working-class conditions. The autonomists borrowed Liebknecht's argument against centralisation, saying that in an over-centralised party the destruction of the central executive involved the destruction of the entire party, and they referred in confirmation of this contention to the history of the Narodnaja Volja. However this may be, Ostrogorskii's demonstration, and still more recently that furnished by Michels, of the essentially oligarchical character of mass organisation even in the case of working-class parties is confirmed by Russian experience.

There are moral as well as utilitarian motives for the rejection of secret societies and the methods of the conspirator. Persons of frank and manly nature are repelled by the dishonesty, the Machiavellianism, and the Jesuitism so often associated with underground activities.

The amnesty associated with the promulgation of the constitution, and the return to Russia of many of the revolutionary refugees, served for a time to strengthen the party of those who favoured political activity by lawful methods. The subsequent reaction, however, and the efforts of absolutism to discredit the duma by rendering the activities of that body sterile, served once again to strengthen the opposition to politism. The remarkable agreement, in this instance, between radicalism and absolutism, is worthy of attention!

An attack on the methods of secret societies led to an attack on terrorism. Upon the basis defended by Plehanov, the orthodox Marxists came to condemn terrorism as anarchist tactics. This was the line taken, in a series of articles against