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

274V. I. LENINThrough an anonymous “Party member” they “criticise”the financial report of the Central Committee while theythemselves announce on the first page of their symposiumthat hitherto “lack of funds” prevented their group frompublishing a newspaper but “now this obstacle has been removed”.So the Vperyod group has now received funds.Pleasant news for the Vperyodists, no doubt. But what a“nerve” you must have, oh most honourable Vperyodists,to utter in print through an anonymous hack in a “popular”symposium a deliberate untruth about the Central Committeeto the effect that “nobody will understand” who the “trustees”are and what money is in their possession, and at thesame time say never a word to the C.C. or the other factionsabout what money “Vperyod” has received and what literatiare disposing of it? The Party, it would seem, is accountableto the Vperyodists but the Vperyodists are not accountableto the Party?It must be repeated over and over again that this hypocrisyof the Vperyodists is due not to the personal traitsof Peter or Paul but to the political falsity of their wholeposition; it is due to the fact that the Machist literati andthe otzovists cannot go into battle openly and directly fortheir non-Social-Democratic pet ideas. Anyone who understandsthese political conditions will not come to a haltbewildered, mystified and downcast at the merely superficialaspect of the matter, at the mass of personal conflicts,bickering, abuse, etc. Anyone who understands these politicalconditions will not be satisfied by a conciliatory phrase(à la Trotsky) to the effect that what we need is “not a struggleagainst the otzovists but the overcoming of otzovism”,for this is empty and meaningless phrase-mongering. Theobjective conditions of the counter-revolutionary era, theera of disintegration, the era of god-building, the era ofMachism, otzovism and liquidationism—these objectiveconditions have put our Party in a state of war againstcircles of literati who are organising their own factions,and this struggle cannot be evaded by a phrase. To standaside from this struggle is to stand aside from one of thecontemporary tasks of the Social-Democratic Labour Party.Sotsial-Demokrat No. 15-16,August 30 (September 12), 1910Published according tothe text in Sotsial-Demokrat