V. I.

Lenin

In his “Motley Encounters” published in the New-Year issue of
Rech , Mr. Tan touched on an important question to which the
workers should pay serious attention. It is the question of the growing
numbers of new democrats.

“ For about a year or perhaps more,” wrote Mr. Tan, “the river of life has been changing and shifting again. Instead of the
water decreasing, there has been an increase, coming from God knows where,
probably from the bowels of the earth and from distant springs. All was
quiet and empty for three years. Now there are people appearing, crawling
one after another out of various crevices and dark corners....

“ People of peasant stock who have come up from below are
the most interesting. Their name is legion. They have flooded the middle
walks of life and are even aiming at the higher ones, especially in the
provinces. Technicians, accountants, agronomists, teachers, all sorts of
Zemstvo clerks. They are all alike—grey-faced, broad-boned,
uncouth-looking; they are not liable to reflexes, and are, indeed, as tough
as cats.... Life must have taken yet another step upwards, for we commoners
compared with them are as the nobility were compared with us.”

This is very apt and true, although we should not forget that the old
as well as the new commoners, those “of peasant stock”, the democratic
intelligentsia and semi-intelligentsia, represent the bourgeoisie as
distinct from the semi-feudal nobility.

But the bourgeoisie consists of different strata having different
historical possibilities. The upper ranks of the bourgeoisie and of the
wealthy bourgeois intelligentsia—lawyers, professors, journalists,
deputies, etc.—almost invariably gravitate towards an alliance with the
Purishkeviches. Thousands of economic threads link this
bourgeoisie to them.

On the other hand, the peasant bourgeoisie and the new intelligentsia
“of peasant stock” are linked by a thousand threads to the mass of the disfranchised, downtrodden, ignorant,
starving peasantry, and by virtue of all their living conditions are
hostile to all Purishkevichism, to any alliance with it.

This new democratic element, which is more numerous and stands closer
to the life of the millions, is rapidly learning, gaining strength and
growing. It is for the most part full of vague opposition sentiments and
feeds on liberal trash. One of the great and responsible tasks of the
politically-conscious workers is to help these democrats to get rid of the
influence of liberal prejudices. Only in so far as they over come these
prejudices, cast off the wretched burden of liberal illusions, break with
the liberals and hold out their hand to the workers are they, Russia’s new
democrats, destined to do something real for the cause of freedom.

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