Published:
Proletary No. 49, October 3 (16), 1909.
Published according to the text in Proletary.
Source:
Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
[1974],
Moscow,
Volume 16,
page 76.
Translated:
Transcription\Markup:
R. Cymbala
Copyleft:
V. I. Lenin Internet Archive (www.marxists.org)
© 2004
Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the
terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.
Only the Bolsheviks have protested against the exaggeration of this Bolshevik idea. When the newspaper Novy Dyen{2} struck a false note by demarcation inadequate in principle from the Trudoviks and Popular Socialists, three Bolshevik writers made an attempt to correct this obliteration of differences in programme and to put agitation in the newspaper and at election meetings on more consistent class, socialist lines. This attempt failed, as far as we know, through no fault of the Bolsheviks. Equally unsuccessful was the attempt of a certain Bolshevik to protest against Jordansky’s arguments in Novy Dyen concerning Social-Democratic views on law and order. Jordansky, like many opportunists, vulgarised Engels’s well-known statement about the “rosy cheeks” that the Social-Democratic movement had acquired on the basis of “legality”. Engels himself strongly protested against a loose interpretation of his idea (see his letters in Neue Zeit), which applied to a definite period of development in Germany (with universal suffrage, etc.).{3} Jordansky thinks it is in place to speak of such a thing under the “legality” of June 3.
{1} The article “The St. Petersburg Election” is devoted to the results of the by-election to the Third Duma held in September 1909; it was printed unsigned in Proletary No. 49, October 3 (16), 1909.
The note written by Lenin was directed against N. Jordansky’s opportunist article, “No Way Out”, published in Novy Dyen, No. 6.
{2} Novy Dyen (New Day)—a legal Social-Democratic weekly newspaper, published in St. Petersburg from July 20 (August 2) to December 13 (26), 1909; 15 issues appeared. The newspaper was ’closed down by the police. Two articles by Lenin were printed in Novy Dyen: “Once More on Partyism and Non-Partyism” and “Concerning Vekhi” (see pp. 62–64, 123–31 of this volume).
{3} This refers to F. Engels’s “Introduction” to Marx’s work The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850. When the “Introduction” was published by the German Social-Democrats in 1895 it was distorted and subsequently interpreted by them as a renunciation of an armed uprising and barricade fighting.
The complete text of the “Introduction” was published for the first time in the U.S.S.R. alone. (Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Vol. I, Moscow, 1958, pp. 118–38)
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