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

284HOW CERTAIN SOCIAL-DEMOCRATSINFORM THE INTERNATIONALABOUT THE STATE OF AFFAIRS IN THE R.S.D.L.P.In connection with the International Congress in Copenhagenarticles have appeared in a number of publicationson the state of affairs in our Party. We shall dwell brieflyon three articles written by spokesmen of three differentParty (or rather anti-Party) trends.The first place for unceremoniousness should go to anarticle which appeared, sad to relate, in the central pressorgan of our comrades in Germany (Vorwärts, August 28).This article is anonymous. It is merely subtitled “FromOur Russian Correspondent”.From it the reader learns that “the Russian emigrantswho play a disproportionately great role in our Party, havenever been so remote from the interests and requirementsof the Russian labour movement as they are today”, that theCentral Organ of our Party, Sotsial-Demokrat, “is beingconducted in a narrow factional spirit” and that the Bolsheviksare noted for “formal and superficial radicalism”,that it is only by a process of evolution that they havefinally come to a “recognition” of parliamentarism, and soon and so forth. The author is extremely dissatisfied withthe majority of our Party. He paints a very black pictureof the whole situation in the Party. He sees only one brightspot in the life of the R.S.D.L.P. This is “the workers’newspaper Pravda, published in Vienna, which from theoutset has stood completely aloof from factional polemicsand devotes itself to political agitation”, and so forth.Don’t you begin to guess, reader, to whose “non-factional”pen this article belongs? You are not mistaken, of course.