Collected Works of V. I. Lenin - Vol. 16 - From Marx to Mao

208V. I. LENINIITHE “UNITY CRISIS” IN OUR PARTYOn reading this title, some readers perhaps will hardlybelieve their eyes. “Well, that’s the limit! What a lot ofcrises we have had in our own Party, and now all of a suddena new crisis, a unity crisis!”The expression which sounds so queer I have borrowedfrom Liebknecht. He used it in 1875 in a letter (dated April21) to Engels, giving an account of the union of the Lassalleansand the Eisenachers. Marx and Engels thought atthat time that no good would come of this union. 94 Liebknechtbrushed aside their fears and asserted that the GermanSocial-Democratic Party, which had successfully survivedall sorts of crises, would also survive the “unity crisis”(see Gustav Mayer, Johann Baptist von Schweitzer unddie Sozialdemokratie, Jena, 1909, S. 424).There can be no doubt whatever that our Party too, theRussian Social-Democratic Labour Party, will successfullysurvive its unity crisis. That it is now passing throughsuch a crisis is obvious to everyone who is acquainted withthe decisions of the plenary meeting of the Central Committeeand with the events that followed. If one were to judgeby the resolutions of the plenum, the union might seem tobe most complete and fully accomplished. But if one wereto judge by what is taking place now in the beginning ofMay 1910, if one were to judge by the determined struggleof the Central Organ against Golos Sotsial-Demokrata, whichis published by the liquidators, by the controversy thathas flared up between Plekhanov and the other pro-PartyMensheviks, on the one hand, and the Golosists on theother, or by the extremely abusive attacks of the “Vperyod”group on the Central Organ (see the recent leaflet of thegroup, entitled “To the Bolshevik Comrades”), then all unitymight easily appear to an outsider to be a mere phantom.The avowed enemies of the Party are rejoicing. The Vperyodists,the adherents and screeners of otzovism, areindulging in unbridled abuse. Still more bitter is the abuselevelled by the leaders of the liquidators, Axelrod, Martynov,Martov, Potresov and others, in their “NecessarySupplement to Plekhanov’s Dnevnik”. The “conciliators” are