Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/392

366 itself in Paris as a "League of the Revolutionary Socialists of the Left," and carrying on its journalistic and literary activities from the French capital, attempted under the leadership of Burcev, the indefatigable historian and publicist, to carry out an inexorable self-criticism, and thereby to liberate the party and its organisation from "revolutionary philistinism." The creative activity of the individual, and the active struggle of an organised minority of persons of initiative, must, said the members of this group, come into their own. The party must realise that it was no more than a minority, and could be nothing else. There is no revolutionary mass; the mass has always been led by minorities. The party must therefore abandon its centralist organisation; Azev was the product of centralisation, The greatest enemy, in truth the only enemy, of socialism (not only in Russia but elsewhere as well) is autocracy. In concrete terms, the Romanov dynasty is everywhere the prop of reaction; it must therefore be the first object of attack, and must first of all be annihilated. The autocracy, too, is only a minority.

From the maximalist side, objections were raised to this program of the left.

The maximalists contended that the minimum socialist program (the minimum social revolutionary program not excepted) comprised, as a whole, those demands which were realisable under the continuance of the old regime. Of course the minimum was extensible, varying according to the way in which the term "realisable" was defined. The minimum might be conceived either in a reformist or in a revolutionary sense.