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

NOTES OF A PUBLICIST247matures depends, of course, on many causes and circumstancesthat cannot be estimated. The Popular Socialists had aspecial group before the revolution, and the secession ofthat group, which was temporarily and loosely affiliatedwith the Socialist-Revolutionaries, was particularly easy.Our independents still have some personal traditions, tieswith the Party, which retard the process of secession, butthese traditions are becoming ever weaker, and, besides,the revolution and counter-revolution bring forward newpeople, free of all revolutionary or Party traditions. Thesurrounding atmosphere of “Vekhist” moods is very rapidlyimpelling the spineless intelligentsia towards “independence”.The “old” generation of revolutionaries is leaving thestage. Stolypin is doing his utmost to hunt down the representativesof this generation most of whom had divulgedall their pseudonyms and their secret channels of work inthe days of freedom, in the years of revolution. Prison,exile, penal servitude and emigration constantly increasethe number of those withdrawn from the ranks, while thenew generation grows slowly. Among the intelligentsia,especially that section of it which has “hitched on” to oneor another form of legal activity, there is developing a completelack of faith in the illegal Party and a disinclinationto spend efforts on work which is particularly difficultand particularly thankless in our times. “Friends in needare friends indeed”, and the working class, which is passingthrough the difficult times of attack both by the old andthe new counter-revolutionary forces, will inevitably witnessthe defection of very many of its intellectual “friendsof an hour”, fine-weather friends, friends only for the durationof the revolution, friends who were revolutionariesduring the revolution, but who are yielding to the generaldepression and are ready to proclaim the “fight for legality”at the first successes of the counter-revolution.In a number of European countries, the counter-revolutionaryforces succeeded in making a clean sweep of theremnants of the revolutionary and socialist organisationsof the proletariat, for instance after 1848. A bourgeoisintellectual, who in the days of his youth joined the Social-Democratic movement is inclined, because of his pettybourgeoispsychology, to give up the struggle: so it was,