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

262V. I. LENINand definiteness of the class contradictions, their aggravationby national oppression, the concentration of the Lettishpopulation and its superior cultural development.In all these respects the situation in which the Russianworking class has to develop and operate is much less developed.It is this underdevelopment that is now engenderinga more acute crisis in the Russian section of the R.S.D.L.P.The petty-bourgeois intellectuals in our movement play abig role. They bring liabilities as well as assets: they bringnot only the elaboration of questions of theory and tacticsbut an “elaboration” of every deviation from the Social-Democratic path into a distinct “trend”, as, for example,“otzovism” and “liquidationism”.We venture to express the hope that the Lettish Social-Democrats, who have every reason to be proud of theirsuccesses, will not consider these vexed questions of theR.S.D.L.P. beneath their dignity.The more class-conscious the proletariat, the more clearlydoes it visualise its Social-Democratic aims, the morevigorously does it fight against all petty-bourgeois distortionsin the workers’ movement, the more is it concernedto free its less developed working-class comrades from theinfluence of petty-bourgeois opportunism.The liquidationist trend in the R.S.D.L.P. is a productof the petty-bourgeois relations in Russia. The whole liberalbourgeoisie takes its stand against the revolution, repudiatesit, anathematises the tactics of 1905, which, itsays, were “bloody and abortive”, grovels before the powersthat be, exhorts the people to confine themselves to legalmethods of struggle. And the petty-bourgeois intellectualsin our Party succumb to the influence of counter-revolutionaryliberalism. A history of the revolution has beenpublished in five volumes (The Social Movement in Russiaat the Beginning of the Twentieth Century, edited by Maslov,Martov and Potresov). This history in effect propagatesthe doctrine of the renegades, that the proletariat “overestimated”its strength and “underestimated” the strengthof the bourgeoisie, and so forth. Actually what the massesof the proletariat did underestimate was the treachery ofthe bourgeoisie; they overestimated the strength of thebourgeoisie in the fight for freedom, and underestimated