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

HISTORICAL MEANING OF INNER-PARTY STRUGGLE IN RUSSIA375classes of Russian society, it was the proletariat that displayedthe greatest political maturity in 1905-07. The Russianliberal bourgeoisie, which behaved in just as vile, cowardly,stupid and treacherous a manner as the German bourgeoisiein 1848, hates the Russian proletariat for the very reasonthat in 1905 it proved sufficiently mature politically to wrestthe leadership of the movement from this bourgeoisie andruthlessly to expose the treachery of the liberals.Trotsky declares: “It is an illusion” to imagine that Menshevismand Bolshevism “have struck deep roots in the depthsof the proletariat”. This is a specimen of the resonant butempty phrases of which our Trotsky is a master. The rootsof the divergence between the Mensheviks and the Bolshevikslie, not in the “depths of the proletariat”, but in theeconomic content of the Russian revolution. By ignoring thiscontent, Martov and Trotsky have deprived themselves ofthe possibility of understanding the historical meaning ofthe inner-Party struggle in Russia. The crux of the matteris not whether the theoretical formulations of the differenceshave penetrated “deeply” into this or that stratum of theproletariat, but the fact that the economic conditions of theRevolution of 1905 brought the proletariat into hostile relationswith the liberal bourgeoisie—not only over the questionof improving the conditions of daily life of the workers,but also over the agrarian question, over all the politicalquestions of the revolution, etc. To speak of the struggle oftrends in the Russian revolution, distributing labels such as“sectarianism”, “lack of culture”, etc., and not to say a wordabout the fundamental economic interests of the proletariat,of the liberal bourgeoisie and of the democratic peasantry,means stooping to the level of cheap journalists.Here is an example: “In the whole of Western Europe,”Martov writes, “the peasant masses are considered suitablefor an alliance [with the proletariat] only to the extent thatthey begin to feel the grave consequences of the capitalistrevolution in agriculture; in Russia, however, a picture hasbeen drawn of a numerically weak proletariat combining witha hundred million peasants who have not yet felt, or havehardly felt, the ‘educational’ effect of capitalism, and thereforehave not yet been through the school of the capitalistbourgeoisie.”