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

NOTES OF A PUBLICIST243Koltsov, Martynov, Avgustovsky, Maslov, Martov—thesame L. Martov who is capable of occupying a place in the“organised hierarchy of institutions” of the illegal Partywhich has a centre like that of an “organised body”, and atthe same time is capable of belonging to the legal group,which with the gracious permission of Stolypin declaresthis illegal Party to be non-existent.4) In the popular Menshevik magazine Vozrozhdeniye(No. 5, March 30, 1910), which has the same contributors,an unsigned, i.e., editorial article praises the above-mentionedarticle by Mr. Potresov in Nasha Zarya and adds,after quoting the same passage quoted by me above:“There is nothing to wind up—and we [i.e., the editorsof Vozrozhdeniye] would add on our part—the dream ofre-establishing this hierarchy in its old underground formis simply a harmful reactionary utopia, which indicatesthe loss of political intuition by the representatives of aparty which at one time was the most realistic of all” (p. 51).Anyone who regards all these facts as accidental apparentlydoes not want to see the truth. Anyone who intendsto explain these facts as “a relapse into factionalism” islulling himself with a phrase. What have these facts to dowith factionalism and the factional struggle, from whichboth the group of Mikhail and Co. and the group of Potresovand Co. have been standing aside for a long time. No,for one who does not deliberately want to shut his eyesno doubts are possible here. The plenum removed all obstacles(real or imaginary) to the return of the pro-Party legalistsinto the Party, it removed all obstacles in the wayof building up an illegal Party, taking into account thenew conditions and new forms of utilising legal possibilities.Four Menshevik members of the Central Committeeand two editors of Golos have admitted that all obstaclesin the way of joint Party work have been removed. Thegroup of Russian legalists has given its answer to the plenum.This answer is in the negative: we do not want to engage inthe restoration and strengthening of the illegal Party,for that is a reactionary utopia.This answer is a fact of the greatest political importancein the history of the Social-Democratic movement. Thegroup of independent socialists (independent of socialism)