V. I.

Lenin

Ourarticle, “The First Results of the Political Alignment”, had
already been written when we received No. 112 of Iskra , which contains
a sort of overwrought, spiteful, tearful and fuming article full of conceits,
entitled “The Fruits of Parochialism”. What else can you call this
article but a fit of hysterics. It is quite impossible to discern even the
shadow of reasoning in this hysterical shriek. What has parochialism to
do with it, dear Iskra comrades, when you yourselves, of your own free will, attended the Conference of the various Social-Democratic parties
and organisations in Russia? Just give the matter a little thought, if you have
not entirely lost the capacity to think; give it at least some thought when your
fit of hysterics is over! Surely if you consented to attend the Conference, if
your delegate was there, that means that you yourselves regarded this Conference
as a serious matter, a Party matter of the utmost importance to the
proletariat. You are only discrediting yourselves for good and all in the eyes
of intelligent workers when you start fulminating after being defeated
at a Conference you yourselves acknowledged as serious and necessary by your
voluntary participation!

Youare displeased with the fact that the Conference, in your opinion, condemned
your tactics too sharply, by calling participation in the Duma treason to the
cause of liberty? But were you not aware, dear Iskra comrades, that you
were going to attend a Conference together with the Central Committee of the
R.S.D.L.P., and that Proletary , organ of this Central Committee, has
for ever so long, both in pamphlets and in articles, been showing up your
transformation into toadies of the monarchist liberal party? You were perfectly well aware of
that, dear Iskra comrades, and if you are now infuriated beyond
all reason, we are really unable to help you. After all, it is an
inescapable and indisputable fact that of all the illegal parties,
organisations, tendencies and press organs of all the peoples of Russia,
only you have remained in the company of Osvobozhdeniye . It is this
fact that constitutes the severest indictment against you, an
indictment so severe that history has rarely known its equal; yet you
imagined that the words “treason to the cause of liberty” were the source of this severity!

Youhave lost your head so much that after your defeat at the Conference you
have raised a hullabaloo about the harmfulness of federalism in organisation,
such as is cherished by the Bund and other national Social-Democratic
groups. How unwise this is of you, dear Iskra comrades, for you are
thereby only stressing the gravity of your defeat. And, indeed, just
think, dear Iskra comrades, who is it that for two years has been
advocating organisational vagueness and amorphousness, the principles of
compromise and decentralisation? You yourselves, the new-Iskrists. And it was
the federalists of the Bund and of the Lettish and Polish Social-Democratic
Labour Parties who at the time played up in the press all your disorganising
catchwords against the so-called excesses of centralism, and so on and so
forth. And, it is likewise a fact, an inescapable and indisputable fact, that
all the federalists of the above-mentioned parties wrote and published
articles in the spirit of the Minority! Just see, dear Iskra comrades,
how inappropriately you have brought up the subject of federalism: you have
thereby stressed the fact that your erstwhile well-wishers of the
Social-Democratic Bund and the Lettish and Polish parties were forced to desert
you, being unable to put up with the utter banality of your Duma tactics! No,
dear Iskra comrades, if you just think matters over, after calming
down, you will yourselves see what is obvious to all—it is not the
“Majority” that has come over to federalism, but the Bund and the
Lettish and Polish Social-Democrats who, influenced by the objective logic of
the revolutionary events, have arrived at a standpoint that has always been
upheld by the “Majority”.

Ofcourse, dear Iskra comrades, you have sustained a telling
defeat. That, however, is not due to any spiteful machinations on the part of
the Majority· or the Polish Social-Democrats, etc., but rather to the
hopeless muddle that manifested itself already in the resolutions on tactics
adopted by the All-Russia Conference of Mensheviks. So long as you stand on the
basis of these resolutions, you will inevitably find yourselves the
“sole companion” of Osvobozhdeniye , against all
Social-Democrats and even against all revolutionary democrats.

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