Date: 1913
Source: ru:PSS/v23

In No. 102 of Pravda[19], I drew the attention of my comrade readers to the “Luch” feuilleton published in Nos. 93 and 94.

I compared this feuilleton with the “Controversial Questions” articles[20] that were being simultaneously serialized in Pravda. I stated: “In these articles, Pravda provides readers with facts and documents that enable them to resolve contentious issues of organization and tactics, whereas in the aforementioned feuilleton, Luch offers gossip and personal attacks—gossip and personal attacks that will not help workers to sort out their disputes but will only clog their minds.”

I argued that this feuilleton was written about the figures of 1905 in the very same language one would use when writing about them in the organs of frightened landlords and of liberal bourgeois enraged at the workers.

“Luch” dispatched Comrade Herman against me. Comrade Herman is a man of great decisiveness and never minces words. Accordingly, he hurled harsh invectives at me. He claimed that I “seek to mislead my comrade readers,” that I “utter deliberate falsehoods,” and that nothing I said had any basis in reality. Having thus accused me of a whole host of offenses, Comrade Herman proceeded to list the titles of several articles from Luch—and with that, he brought his article to a close.

Very well! But what, then, are we to make of the very feuilleton in Luch that I had actually discussed and quoted? Not a single word did Comrade Herman utter about it in his entire article; he neither challenged the accuracy of the passages I had cited from it nor attempted to refute my characterization of that feuilleton as wholly unacceptable in the workers’ press—indeed, he did not offer a single counterargument. How can this be? You have castigated me, good sir, with all your might—but not only were you unable to refute a single word of what I had said about the Luch feuilleton, you did not even attempt to do so.

Was there, indeed, a feuilleton in Nos. 93 and 94 about which I had written? Yes, there was. Then what right do you have to claim that “nothing of the sort ever actually occurred”?

Is this feuilleton filled with gossip and petty squabbles instead of a calm, reasoned examination of the points of disagreement? Yet you did not dare to say a single word in opposition to that very charge! What right, then, do you have to suspect me of seeking to “mislead my comrades”?

Did you ever stop to consider what you were writing? Did you ever reflect that, in accusing a contributor to a workers’ newspaper of “deliberate falsehoods” and of seeking to “mislead readers,” you ought to be prepared to answer—not before me, but before all those who stand behind Pravda, that is, before its working-class readers?

You set out to defend Luch against my accusation that the feuilleton in its Nos. 93 and 94 did not clarify the contentious issues at hand, but rather muddied readers’ minds with gossip and “personal attacks.” And to that end, you placed on the pages of Luch itself a series of baseless accusations and outright slander (“The Reader” (that is, I) seeks to mislead my comrade readers), thereby doing precisely what I had accused Luch of doing in its No. 94 feuilleton. With your article, you confirmed my accusation against Luch—rather than refuting it.

Now, you may perhaps say: All of this arose from my own inexperience. Very well! But your little article was reviewed by the editorial board. Why did they not warn you? Why did they not point out to you that, in accusing me, you should first and foremost have sought to refute the facts I had cited—rather than simply brushing those facts aside with yet another silence? Why? Clearly because the editorial board knew that everything I had said about the feuilleton in Nos. 93 and 94 was true; they knew that there was no way to disprove me. And so they let you off with nothing more than a round of empty invective—repeating, once again, the very tactic for which I had criticized them in my very first article.

What kind of role did you—yourself, the self‑styled “worker”—play in the hands of the Luch editorial board?

Pravda, No. 114, May 19, 1913. Signed: The Reader

Printed according to the text of the newspaper Pravda