The struggle against recallism and liquidationism, which has naturally occupied first place among the tasks of the genuinely Marxist and social-democratic elements of our party, must not, however, obscure from us an evil more profound, which in essence gave birth to both recallism and liquidationism and will, to all appearances, give birth to no few other new tactical absurdities. This evil is ideological disintegration and confusion, which has completely seized liberalism and is breaking through into our party from all sides.

Here is one of numerous illustrations of this confusion. A comrade, who has worked in the party for a long time, an old Iskraist and old Bolshevik, was removed by imprisonment and exile from participation in the movement for a very long time, since the beginning of 1906 or so. Recently he returned to work, became acquainted with recallism-ultimatism, rejected it with indignation and outrage, as a monstrous distortion of revolutionary social-democratic tactics. Having familiarized himself with the state of work in Odessa and Petrograd, this comrade came, among other things, to the following conclusion or "unformed result" of his observations: "... it seems to me that the most difficult period has passed and that the task remains to liquidate the remnants of the epoch of collapse and disintegration." But these remnants are not insignificant.

"Throughout Petrograd work," we read in the same letter, "there is a felt absence of a guiding unified center, lack of discipline, disorder, absence of connection between separate parts, absence of unity and systematic work. Everyone works at his own risk and peril. In the illegal organization, recallist tendencies are strong; they capture even anti-recallists..." (evidently, this refers to those Bolsheviks who, contrary to repeated and decisive insistence by *Proletarii*, do not break with the recallists, do not wage merciless struggle against them, but attempt conciliation, uselessly prolonging the inevitable denouement and receiving in fact no renunciation from the recallist-ultimatists of their absurd tactics). "... On this soil there develops one characteristic phenomenon, which manifested itself completely independently in Odessa too: revolutionary idleness. Everywhere where the spirit of recallism dominates, it is starkly apparent that illegal organizations do nothing. One or two propaganda circles, struggle against legal opportunities—that is the sum total of their work. It is predominantly of a disorganizing character, which you can discern from the extensive materials which I sent you from Odessa..." (used in the article:... [21]). "... As regards legal opportunities, in their utilization there is lacking a consistent social-democratic line. In the darkness of reaction the opportunists of social-democracy have raised their heads and 'dare,' knowing that it is now not dangerous, against the fundamental principles of social-democracy. Here you encounter such extensive revision of revolutionary social-democracy, its program, its tactics, that the Bernstein revision will appear before it as a childish, infantile game. The RSDLP does not understand Marx; it has made an incorrect analysis of the tendencies of economic development in Russia; in Russia there was never serfdom, but rather a serf-commercial system; the contradiction between the interests of the bourgeoisie and the landowner nobility did not exist and does not exist; there is no alliance between them either, because these two classes, invented by Russian social-democracy, represent one bourgeois class (this is a distinctive feature of Russia); autocracy is the organization of this class. The weakness of the Russian bourgeoisie, upon which the slogan "the dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry" was based, is invented, and this slogan was and remains utopian. It must be thrown out together with the democratic republic, because the Russian train has switched onto German rails..."

It is clear that before us is an instantaneous photograph of one of the rivulets of that broad stream of ideological confusion which gives birth to recallism and liquidationism, sometimes bizarrely mixing and even bringing together the premises of extreme right-wing and extreme "left"-wing stupidity. The first half of these premises (the absence of contradiction between the bourgeoisie and serf landholding, etc.) is so absurd and nonsensical that it is difficult to take it seriously. It is not worth cry...[22]

Written at the end of November 1909

First published in 1933 in Lenin Miscellany XXV

Printed from the manuscript