V. I.

Lenin

The leading article of this issue had already gone to press
when we received the first issue of the liquidationist Nevsky Golos . V. Yezhov, the well-known liquidator of Nasha Zarya ,
at once presented the new organ with such a gem that one is left gasping!
Here it is, if you please:

“ Owing to this [i.e., owing to the variety of the strikes, which in some cases did not go beyond a protest against the
imposition of fines for celebrating May Day, while in other cases they
supplemented the protest with economic demands, etc.], the principle
involved in the protest (after all, it was not over a few kopeks that the
strike was called) became obscured [!??!] in a considerable number of
cases, being complicated by economic demands....

“ Their own experience should have suggested to the workers that it was inadvisable [!!] to complicate their protest by
economic demands, just as it is inadvisable to complicate [!?] an ordinary
strike by demands involving principles.

“ It is necessary to give organisational form to the sentiments of the worker masses. It is necessary to increase propaganda for
trade unions, to recruit new members for them. This is all the more
necessary since there are many hotheads among the workers nowadays who are
carried away by the mass movement and speak at meetings against unions , alleging them to be useless and unnecessary.

“ A period of economic strikes [only economic?] is ahead
of us. It would be an irreparable mistake to allow them to become inter
twined with political actions of the workers [!!!]. Such a combination
would have a harmful effect [!!??] on both the economic and the political
struggle.”

Here you have the perfectly liberal Mr. Severyanin copied by the
liquidator! Utter incomprehension of the fact that a revolutionary mass strike necessarily combines the
economic with the political strike; narrow-mindedness, a monstrous
distortion of the revolutionary character of the upswing and attempts to measure it by the yardstick of “ordinary strikes”; the most
reactionary advice “not to complicate” politics with economics and not to
“intertwine” them; and the using of the legally published press for an
attack in the spirit of Struve and Maklakov against the revolutionary
worker Social-Democrats, who are described as “hotheads” speaking out
“against unions”!

A liberal cannot understand a revolutionary Social-Democrat
except as one who is “against unions”. But the workers at the meetings
were, of course, not “against unions”, but against substituting
liberal slogans for revolutionary ones, which is what Mr. Yezhov and
Co. are doing. Our slogan is not freedom of association, said the workers,
and “trade unions” are not the only, nor the chief, means of “giving”
our movement “organisational form”. Our slogan is the demand for a
republic (see the appeal of the St. Petersburg workers), we are building an
illegal party capable of leading the revolutionary onslaught of
the masses upon the tsarist monarchy. That is what the workers said at the
meetings.

But the Liebers and Trotskys are assuring the workers that it is
possible for the Social-Democratic proletariat and its Party to “unite”
with liberals à la Yezhov, Potresov and Co.!

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