V. I.

Lenin

Inissue No. 89 of Iskra , just arrived, we find a decision of the
“Party Council” dated March 8, 1905. As was to be expected, the
“Council” abroad frets and fumes against the Party Congress which is
being convened by the Party commit tees in Russia, declaring that “in
acting the way they do, its participants place themselves outside the
Party”. We quite understand the resentment of the group abroad, from whom
the Party working in Russia has long since moved away in actual fact and is now
moving away also formally. We also understand that only under the spur of
resentment and despair can people argue so illogically and “deviate from
the truth” as maladroitly as does the Council. “According to the
Party Rules,” we are told, “the Congress can be convened only by the
Council.” Yes, except in those cases when the Council breaks these Rules and,
instead of convening the Congress, as it is in duty bound to do, fraudulently
evades the issue. Precisely such a “case” was proved long ago by the
Party against the Council (see Orlovsky’s The Council Against the Party , where he shows, among other things, that according to the
“Council’s” arithmetic, 16x4=61!).

We are told further that on January 1, 1905, according to the unanimous decision of the
Council (including Lenin’s vote) there were 33 qualified organisations besides
the centres. That is not true. The Party has long known, from that pamphlet,
that on January 1, 1905, the number of such organisations was only 29. The
Kuban and Kazan committees mentioned by Iskra were never approved by
the Council, while the Polesyc and North-Western committees were approved only
as of April 1, 1905. This leaves 29 organisations (the committees of
St. Petersburg, Moscow, Tver, the North, Tula, Nizhni-Novgorod, Saratov, Ural-Ufa, Siberia, Don, Kharkov, Kiev, Odessa,
Ekaterinoslav, Riga, Orel-Bryansk, Smolensk, Samara, Voronezh, the
Caucasian Federation=4 committees, Kursk, Astrakhan, Nikolayev, Crimea,
the Mining and Metal District, and the League). The “Bureau of
Committees of the Majority” maintains that it has been authorised by
ten organisations, the Council further states. That is a lie. The Bureau
was elected, as everyone knows, before January 1, 1905, at three
conferences, by 13 committees (6 Northern, 3 Southern, and 4
Caucasian). After the Bureau announced the convening of the Congress, the
Voronezh and Tula committees aligned themselves with it. So that up to
January 1, 1905, out of the 28 qualified organisations in Russia, 15
declared for the Congress, in defiance of the Bonapartist centres. This
does not include the qualified organisations (the Saratov, Siberian, and
other committees) which long ago declared themselves generally in favour of
the Congress (see Shakhov’s pamphlet The Struggle for the Congress). How ludicrous and clumsy are the Council’s attempts to
deceive the uninformed public, which learns of what is happening, not from
documents, but from gossip abroad, is strikingly illustrated in the
following two reports. In the very interesting pamphlet Report of the Geneva Meeting on September 2, 1904 , issued by the Minority, Dan admits that the majority of the Party committees broke off all comradely
relations with Iskra , while Plekhanov, a bitter opponent of the
Majority, was compelled to declare that the forces of the warring camps were
approximately equal! (This is the opinion of a resident abroad, mark you.)
In Lenin’s

Statement [1]

–which,

far from being refuted by the Minority, was openly acknowledged by
Popov—no less a person than an agent of the Central Committee admits that the Minority has only four
committees in Russia, and that at a real Party congress the Editorial Board
and the Council are certain to be removed from office. Once more: whom are
you trying to fool, you heroes of co-optation? You are mortally afraid of
the only real Party solution—the Congress—while at the same time
you claim that your opponents are backed by a negligible fraction of the
total number of organisations, only about a quarter at the most! In your fury you fail to see that
you are castigating no one but yourselves. Is Nicholas II, then,
afraid of a Constituent Assembly because the enemies of tsarism
constitute only a negligible fraction of the people?

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Notes:
[1]
See present edition, Vol. 7, p. 537.— Ed .