The Stalin school of falsification - Marxists Internet Archive

Stalin School of Falsification -- Chapter 11
dear the interest of the movement, will keep on working, the rest will take care of itself. This, in my
opinion, is for the best."
This is not the place to dwell on how correctly Stalin had defined the composition of the blocs. That is
not in question here. Lenin was waging a desperate struggle against the legalists, liquidators and
opportunists, for the perspective of the second revolution. All the groupings abroad at that time were
fundamentally determined by that struggle. But how did the Bolshevik, Stalin, evaluate these battles?
Like the most inept empiricist: "A tempest in a teapot; let them climb the walls; keep on working, the rest
will take care of itself." Stalin welcomes the mood of indifference to theory and the presumed superiority
of myopic "practicals" over revolutionary theorists. "This, in my opinion is for the best," he writes with
reference to those moods which were characteristic of the period of reaction and decline. Thus, in the per
son of Stalin, the Bolshevik, we have not even political conciliationism -- for, conciliationism was an
ideological tendency, which attempted to create a principled platform -- we have blind empiricism,
verging on complete disregard of the principled problems of the revolution.
It is not difficult to imagine the lashing the hapless editors of Zarya Vostoka received for the publication
of this letter; and the measures that were taken on an "All-Union scale" to prevent any further publication
of such letters.
6. In his report at the Seventh Plenum of the E.C.C.I. (1926), Stalin characterized the party's past in the
following manner:
If we take the history of our party from the moment of its inception in the shape of the Bolshevik group
in 1903, and if we follow its subsequent stages down to our own day, then we can say without
exaggeration that the history of our party is the history of the conflict of the contradictions within the
party. There is not, and there cannot be a 'middle' line in questions of a principled character. . .
These momentous words were directed against ideological "conciliationism" toward those against whom
Stalin was waging his struggle. But these abstract formula of ideological irreconcilability are in complete
contradiction with the political physiognomy and the political past of Stalin him self. As an empiricist he
was a congenital conciliationist, but precisely because he was an empiricist he gave no principled
expression to his conciliationism.
7. In 1912, Stalin participated in Zvezda, the legal news paper of the Bolsheviks. The Petersburg editorial
board, in a direct struggle against Lenin, issued this paper at first as a conciliationist organ. Here is what
Stalin wrote in a programmatic editorial article:
"...It will be a source of satisfaction to us, if our news paper succeeds, without falling into the polemical
infatuation of the differeut factions, in defending ably the spiritual treasures of consistent democracy
which are being impudently encroached upon both by the open enemies and the false friends." (The
Revolotion and the C.P.S.U.-Materiais and Documents, Vol. V, pp. 161f.)
The phrase referring to the "polemical infatuation of the different [ ! ] factions" is aimed entirely against
Lenin, against Lenin's "tempest in a teapot," and his constant readiness to "climb the walls" due to some
sort of "polemical infatuation."
Thus, Stalin's article is completely in harmony with the vulgar conciliationist tendency expressed in his
above-quoted letter of 1911, and is in complete contradiction with his latter-day declaration as to the
impermissibility of a middle line in questions of a principled character.
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