V. I. Lenin

While the pro-Party Mensheviks in quite a number of groups abroad are rallying together and coming out more and more
strongly against the patently liquidationist trend of Golos Sotsial-Demokrata , the Vienna Pravda is still acting
evasively. In No. 42 we find an article entitled “To Unity—Despite All
Obstacles”. In this article one cannot but approve the first, even if very
timid and very incomplete, attempt to carry out the resolution of the
C.C. about explaining the danger of liquidationism. On the other
hand, the who]e of the first part of the article is an illustration how
much further from defending partyism certain alleged non-factional
Social-Democrats are than the pro-Party Mensheviks.

Here Pravda tells a downright untruth, asserting that the
editorial board of the Central Organ in the article entitled “ Golos (Voice ) of the Liquidators Against the

Party” {1} declared the “whole agreement” to have been “disrupted”. Anyone who has
read No. 12 of the Central Organ will see that we did not say anything of
the sort. The agreement with the Mensheviks was on condition that
they recognised partyism and sincerely, consistently renounced
liquidationism. Golos Sotsial-Demokrata and a group of its
followers in Russia disrupted this agreement: some, like Mikhail,
Roman, Yuri, etc. in Russia? by declaring openly that the agreement itself
was harmful (“the resolutions of the Central Committee are harmful”; the
very existence of the Central Committee is harmful; there is no need to
liquidate the Party, it has been liquidated already), others, like
Golos , by defending the utterances of the former. The pro-Party
Mensheviks, headed by Plekhanov, rebelled against the Golosists for their
violation of the agreement. If Pravda nevertheless wants as before, while speaking of the Mensheviks “in
general”, to have in mind only the Golosists to the exclusion of the
Plekhanovites and the pro-Party Mensheviks, we shall always expose such a
mode of action everywhere.

Pravda declares that it “cannot and does not want to enter
into a discussion” of the conflicts after the plenum, firstly, because
“it is not in possession of the factual data required for a correct
judgement”.

To this we reply: if Pravda abroad has not yet found sufficient “data” in the conduct of the Golosist liquidators it
never will. In order to see the truth one must not fear to face
the truth.

“... Secondly—and this is the most important—because organisational
conflicts require organisational and not literary intervention.”

This principle is correct. But the pro-Party Mensheviks “intervened”,
as any Party member should, in the appraisal of an ideological and not an
organisational conflict. Pravda does the opposite. It invokes a
principle but does not follow it in practice. Actually, Pravda
devoted the first paragraph of its article to “interfering” in an
organisational conflict. And that is not all. In its version of
the organisational conflict Pravda brings grist to the mill of the liquidators by calling our article “harsh in the extreme” but
without qualifying the anti-Party behaviour of the Golosists; it
tells an untruth by describing as a factional conflict the struggle between the Party’s Central Organ and the
anti-Party section of the Mensheviks (namely, the Golosists); it
tells a half-truth by passing over in silence the splitting manifesto of
the four editors of Golos Sotsial-Demokrata , and so forth.

A workers’ newspaper should either have kept off the subject of the
“organisational” conflict or have given a full account of it, telling the
whole truth.

One of the serious obstacles to Party unity lies in the attempts to
screen the anti-partyism of Golos . Keeping silent about its
liquidationism or adopting a frivolous attitude to it only aggravates the
danger of liquidationism.

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Notes:
{1}
See pp. 156–64 of this volume.— Ed .