V. I.

Lenin

I became acquainted with Comrade Proshyan and learned to value his co-operation during our work together in
the Council of People’s Commissars, at the end of last year and the beginning of the present year, when the Left
S.R.s were in alliance with us. Proshyan stood out for his deep devotion to the revolution and to socialism . It
could not be said of all the Left S.R.s that they were socialists, and this could even hardly be said of most of them.
But this had to be said about Proshyan, because, in spite
of his loyalty to the ideology of the Russian Narodniks,
a non-socialist ideology, you saw in Proshyan a deeply convinced socialist. In his own way, not through Marxism,
not starting with the idea of the class struggle of the
proletariat, did this man become a socialist; and I was able
to observe more than once, when working together with him in the Council of People’s Commissars, how Comrade
Proshyan would resolutely side with the Bolsheviks, the
Communists, against his fellow Left Socialist– Revolutionaries, when they expressed the standpoint of the petty
proprietors and took a negative attitude to communist measures
in the sphere of agriculture.

I particularly recall a conversation with Comrade
Proshyan not long before the Brest peace. It seemed then that
there no longer remained any substantial differences between us. Proshyan began speaking to me about the need
for our parties to amalgamate, saying that the Left S.R.s
most remote from communism (at that time, the word was not yet commonly used) had noticeably, and very
strongly, drawn closer to it during the period of our work
together in the Council of People’s Commissars. I was reserved as regards Proshyan’s proposal, and called it premature,
but did not at all deny that we had come closer in our practical work.

The Brest peace brought about a complete divergence, and from divergence, given Proshyan’s revolutionary
consistency and convictions, there could not but develop direct,
even armed struggle. I must admit I did not in any way expect matters to go as far as an insurrection, or such facts
as the betrayal of Commander-in-Chief Muravyov, a Left
S.R. But the example of Proshyan revealed how deep the roots of patriotism were even in the most sincere and
convinced socialists from among the Left S.R.s, how differences
in the general principles underlying men’s world views had inevitably shown themselves at a difficult
turning-point in history. The subjectivism of the Narodniks led
to a fatal error on the part of even the best of them, who
let themselves be blinded by the spectre of monstrous strength, that of German imperialism. Any other struggle
against that imperialism except an insurrectionary one,
and moreover immediately, that very minute, without any
consideration of the objective conditions of the international situation and our own, seemed in the light of a
revolutionary’s duty absolutely intolerable. It was the effect
of the very same mistake which in 1907 made the
Socialist-Revolutionaries unconditionally “boycott” the Stolypin
Duma. But in the circumstances of hot revolutionary battles the error took a more cruel revenge, and pushed
Proshyan on to the path of armed struggle against the Soviet
power.

Nevertheless up to July 1918 Proshyan succeeded in doing more to strengthen the Soviet power than he did
after July 1918 to undermine it. And in the international
situation created after the German revolution, a new approach by Proshyan to communism—a firmer one than
before—would have been inevitable but for his untimely death.

N. Lenin

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