Date: 1909-09-20
Source: ru:PSS/v47; en:CW/CW34

Source: PSS vol 47

Dear Friend! I received your letter dated September 20, 1909, and was immensely delighted to hear from you. It’s a pity we hadn’t heard from you sooner—here we are utterly cut off from the world, though we’ve tried repeatedly to reach out to you and to Vyach., without success. The years have indeed been hellishly difficult, and the opportunity to maintain contact with old friends is all the more precious for that reason. I’ll respond to you in due course. You’ve seen the newspaper up through December 12, 1908. Since then, much water has flowed under the bridge.

Among the so‑called “leftists,” we have suffered a complete split, formalized in the spring of 1909. If you happen to come across my book on philosophy—which I sent to you immediately upon its publication, that is, in early summer 1909—and the newspaper from 1909, you’d be hard-pressed to claim that we are making concessions to the left-wing fools. With Maximov and the Maximovites, the split is both complete and formal.

The struggle is in full swing. It’s possible they may establish their own organ—but it’s also possible they won’t. They’re stirring things up in St. Petersburg and Odessa, yet they lack the strength to gain a foothold: in my view, this is the dying throes of “recallism–ultimatism.” The split with Maximov and Co. cost us considerable energy and time, but I believe it was inevitable—and in the end, it will prove beneficial. Knowing your views, I even feel confident that we agree on this point.

But when it comes to the idea that it’s time to “liquidate faith in the second coming of a broadly democratic offensive,” I firmly disagree with you. By doing so, you would only play into the hands of the recallists—those who are all too prone to such “maximalist” tendencies: the bourgeois revolution is behind us; ahead lies a “purely proletarian” one—and into the hands of the most extreme right-wing Menshevik liquidators. (By the way: do you know about the split within the Meck group? Plekhanov withdrew from the editorial board of their newspaper, “Golos Sotsial-Demokrata,” as well as from the collective authorship of their work, “Social Movement in Russia in the 20th Century.” In August 1909, he published No. 9 of his “Diary,” where he branded the Meck members as accomplices of the liquidators, and he declared to Potresov that Potresov was no longer my comrade, that Potresov had ceased to be a revolutionary, and so on. We are working toward closer ties with the Plekhanovite Mensheviks—with the aim of strengthening the Party.) But above all, in my view, the fundamental issue is that this perspective is theoretically flawed. “German rails” are certainly possible—there’s no denying that. We acknowledged this explicitly as early as 1908. Yet this possibility will only become a reality through a series of “broadly democratic” offensives—or surges, or crises, and the like—much as France did not arrive at the end of its “broadly democratic” offensives after 1789–1793, but rather after 1871 (that is, after 1830, 1848, and 1871); Germany did not achieve its goal in 1849–1850, but rather after 1871—after the Verfassungsstreit* of the 1860s. Struve, Guchkov, and Stolypin are straining every nerve to “unite” and give birth to a Bismarckian Russia—but it simply does not work.

It does not work. They are impotent. All signs point to this, and they themselves admit that it does not work. Stolypin’s agrarian policy is sound from the standpoint of Bismarckianism. Yet Stolypin himself “requests” twenty years to bring it to fruition—to make it “bear fruit.” But twenty years—and even a shorter span—are impossible in Russia without the years 1930–1948–1971 (if viewed through a French lens) or 1963–1965 (if viewed through a German lens). It is impossible. And all these dates—both 1930–1948–1971 and 1963–1965—are themselves manifestations of the “broadly democratic offensive.”

No, we cannot “liquidate” the idea of a “broadly democratic offensive”: that would be a fundamental error. We must acknowledge the possibility of “German rails,” but we must never forget that, for now, those rails do not exist—not yet. They do not exist—and they will not exist. We must not tie the fate of the proletarian party to the success or failure of the bourgeois revolution—this is beyond dispute. We must structure our work in such a way that, whatever the course of events, it becomes a solid, irrevocable achievement—this is true. But we are duty-bound to fulfill our responsibility as leaders of the democratic, “broadly democratic” movement to the very end—until the Russian year 1871, until the peasantry fully turns toward the Ordnungspartei**. And before that turning point, oh, how far away it still is in Russia! We cannot deny the possibility of a “German,” or rather a “decadent,” resolution to the “broadly democratic” questions—but we are obligated to do everything…

* – the constitutional conflict. Ed.

** – the Party of Order. Ed.