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

FACTION OF SUPPORTERS OF OTZOVISM AND GOD-BUILDERS55and the Moscow Committee). On the other hand, you bewailthe split and refuse to recognise the “removal”. On the onehand, you are in fact hand in glove with the otzovists andgod-builders, on the other you repudiate them and pose aspeacemakers who want to make peace between the Bolsheviksand the otzovists and god-builders.“Abandon hope for ever!” You can try to win a majority.You can gain what victories you like among immature Bolshevikmembers. We shall not agree to any reconciliation.Form your faction, or rather: go on forming it, since youhave already begun, but do not try to deceive the Party,do not try to deceive the Bolsheviks. All the conferencesand congresses in the world are powerless now to reconcilethe Bolsheviks with the otzovists, the ultimatumists andthe god-builders. We have said and we repeat it once again:every Bolshevik Social-Democrat and every class-consciousworker must make his fixed and final choice.VIConcealing their ideological kin, afraid to declare theirreal platform, the new faction is trying to fill up the gapsin its ideological stock-in-trade by borrowing words fromthe vocabulary of old splits. The “new Proletary”, the“new Proletary line”, shout Maximov and Nikolayevimitating the fight against the new Iskra in the old days.It is a trick that might beguile certain political infants.But you are not even capable of repeating old words,gentlemen. The “point” of the slogan “against the newIskra” was that when the Mensheviks took over Iskra theythemselves had to start a new line of policy, whereas theCongress (the Second Congress of the R.S.D.L.P. in 1903)had endorsed the line of the old Iskra. The “point” was thatthe Mensheviks (through the mouth of Trotsky in 1903-04)had to declare: the old Iskra and the new are poles apart.And to this day Potresov and Co. are trying to remove fromthemselves the “traces” of the period when they were guidedby the old Iskra.Proletary is now in its 47th issue. The first came outexactly three years ago, in August 1906. In this first issue of