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

FACTION OF SUPPORTERS OF OTZOVISM AND GOD-BUILDERS39instance, follows inevitably from our attitude to the presentmoment, to the attempts of the autocracy to take a stepforward along the path of creating a bourgeois monarchy, tothe significance of the Duma as an organisation of counterrevolutionaryclasses in a representative institution on anational scale. Just as the anarchists display an invertedparliamentary cretinism when they separate the questionof parliament from the whole question of bourgeois societyin general and try to create a trend from outcries againstbourgeois parliamentarism (although criticism of bourgeoisparliamentarism is in principle on the same level as criticismof the bourgeois press, bourgeois syndicalism and soforth), so our otzovists, ultimatumists and boycottists, inexactly the same way, display inverted Menshevism whenthey form a separate trend on the question of the attitude tothe Duma, on the question of methods of combating deviationson the part of the Social-Democratic group in the Duma(and not the deviations of bourgeois literati, who come intothe Social-Democratic movement incidentally, and so on).The climax of this inverted parliamentary cretinism isreached in the famous argument of the leader of the Moscowotzovists whom Maximov is shielding: the recall of the Dumagroup should serve to emphasise that the revolution is notdead and buried! And Maximov with pure and unruffledbrow does not hesitate to declare publicly: “the otzovistshave never (of course, never!) expressed anti-parliamentarysentiments at all.”This shielding of the otzovists by Maximov and Co. isone of the most characteristic features of the new factionand we must dwell on it in all the more detail because theunenlightened public is all too often taken in by our bitterlycomplaining removed ones. It consists firstly in the fact thatMaximov and Co. are forever beating their breasts andprotesting: we are not otzovists, we do not share the opinionsof the otzovists at all! Secondly, Maximov and Co. accusethe Bolsheviks of exaggerating the fight against the otzovists.It is an exact repetition of the story of the attitude ofthe Rabocheye Dyelo-ists (in the years 1897-1901) to theadherents of Rabochaya Mysl. “We are not Economists,” 27cried the Rabocheye Dyelo-ists, beating their breasts, “wedo not share the views of Rabochaya Mysl, we are carrying