V. I.

Lenin

Preface to the Russian Translation of K. Kautsky’s Pamphlet Social-Democracy Wiped Out !

This is the Russian translation of a pamphlet written by one of the most
outstanding representatives of German Social-Democracy. The author has succeeded
in covering a far wider ground than the subject he has chosen would lead one to
expect. Instead of merely refuting the lying assertions of Herr Burger, an
unscrupulous henchman of the manufacturers, he has provided a wonderfully lucid
and popular outline of the fundamental problems of the working-class movement,
not only in Germany but all over the world. The decay of small-scale production
and the impoverishment of the people are taking place everywhere. Like Herr
Burger, the bourgeois politicians and economists in all countries are trying
hard to obscure this fact. A methodical examination of the arguments usually
advanced by these gentlemen is therefore of great value.

The author deals almost exclusively with facts concerning Germany. On some
questions it would be useful to supplement these with facts concerning
Russia. The publishers will probably make an effort to do so if this pamphlet
achieves the circulation ii fully deserves. It must be observed, however, that
Russian industrial and agricultural statistics are in a most pitiable condition
compared with German. In the case of Germany, it is possible to compare the
returns of two national industrial and agricultural censuses, taken at
different times. In Russia, not a single census of this kind has ever been
taken, and apart from the Zemstvo statistics which have analysed in a European
way

only small, isolated sections of our national economy, we have nothing more than
the lying, slipshod, bureaucratically muddled statistics of various
“departments”, which would better deserve the title of police
whitewash.

The Russian bureaucracy is preventing the Russian people from learning the
whole truth about their conditions. But every educated Russian reader will
easily recall hundreds and thousands of examples from our literature,
illustrating the conditions of peasant farming, the handicraft trades and factory
life, which fully bear out the conclusions arrived at by the author of this
pamphlet. Every Russian worker and peasant will easily see that the
impoverishment of the people described in this pamphlet is going on in
Russia on a still larger scale, and in still more intense and cruder forms.

March 1906

N. Lenin

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