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

HISTORICAL MEANING OF INNER-PARTY STRUGGLE IN RUSSIA391small “detail”. He “forgot” to mention that at an officialmeeting of its representatives held as far back as the springof 1909, the Bolshevik faction repudiated and expelled theotzovists. But it is just this “detail” that is inconvenient forTrotsky, who wants to talk of the “falling to pieces” of theBolshevik faction (and then of the Party as well) and not ofthe falling away of the non-Social-Democratic elements!We now regard Martov as one of the leaders of liquidationism,one who is the more dangerous the more “cleverly”he defends the liquidators by quasi-Marxist phrases. ButMartov openly expounds views which have put their stampon whole tendencies in the mass labour movement of 1903-10.Trotsky, on the other hand, represents only his own personalvacillations and nothing more. In 1903 he was a Menshevik;he abandoned Menshevism in 1904, returned to the Mensheviksin 1905 and merely flaunted ultra-revolutionaryphrases; in 1906 he left them again; at the end of 1906 headvocated electoral agreements with the Cadets (i.e., he wasin fact once more with the Mensheviks); and in the spring of1907, at the London Congress, he said that he differed fromRosa Luxemburg on “individual shades of ideas rather thanon political tendencies”. One day Trotsky plagiarises fromthe ideological stock-in-trade of one faction; the next dayhe plagiarises from that of another, and therefore declareshimself to be standing above both factions. In theory Trotskyis on no point in agreement with either the liquidators or theotzovists, but in actual practice he is in entire agreementwith both the Golosists and the Vperyodists.Therefore, when Trotsky tells the German comrades thathe represents the “general Party tendency”, I am obligedto declare that Trotsky represents only his own faction andenjoys a certain amount of confidence exclusively amongthe otzovists and the liquidators. The following facts provethe correctness of my statement. In January 1910, the CentralCommittee of our Party established close ties with Trotsky’snewspaper Pravda and appointed a representative ofthe Central Committee to sit on the editorial board. In September1910, the Central Organ of the Party announced arupture between the representative of the Central Committeeand Trotsky owing to Trotsky’s anti-Party policy. In Copenhagen,Plekhanov, as the representative of the pro-Party