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

234V. I. LENINit is, of course, connected in sequence with the whole pasthistory of Russian Social-Democracy, but it is least of all[!!] connected with the ‘London heritage’. 101 However, weshould be incorrigible doctrinaires if we thought it possibleto achieve at one stroke absolute unanimity in our Party,if we sacrificed a big step forward in the movement for thesake of parochialism” (!!). “We can leave the correction ofthese mistakes in the resolution to historians.”This sounds as though the Golosists who attended theplenum had been rebuked for their “complaisance to theBolsheviks” by their Russian legalists, like Potresov andCo., or by the editors of Golos who were not at the plenum,and as though they were apologising to them. We are notdoctrinaires, let historians correct the mistakes of theresolution!To this magnificent declaration we venture to rejointhat pro-Party Social-Democrats draw up resolutions notfor the benefit of historians, but to derive practical guidancefrom these resolutions in their work of propaganda, agitationand organisation. The Party has no other definitionof the problems of this work for the period of the ThirdDuma. To the liquidators, of course, Party resolutions meannothing, because the whole Party means nothing to them,and, as far as they are concerned, the whole Party (and notonly its resolutions) is a worth-while and interesting studyonly for “historians”. But neither the Bolsheviks nor thepro-Party Mensheviks want to work with the liquidatorsin one organisation and will not work with them. We shallask the liquidators to join the Bezgolovtsi 102 or the PopularSocialists. 103If the Golosists were loyally inclined towards the Party,if they really complied with the interests of the Party andnot those of Potresov and Co., the interests of the organisationof the revolutionary Social-Democrats, not those ofa circle of legalist literati, they would have expressed theirdissatisfaction with the resolutions of December 1908 ina different manner. Now, after the plenum, they wouldcease unseemly, contemptuous sniggering which is thespecial characteristic of the Cadets, at some kind of “decisions”from “underground”. They would set about analysingthese decisions in a business-like manner and amending