Collected Works of V. I. Lenin - Vol. 26 - From Marx to Mao

223LETTER TO THE CENTRAL COMMITTEEOF THE R.S.D.L.P.(B.)Dear Comrades,No self-respecting party can tolerate strike-breakingand blacklegs in its midst. That is obvious. The more wereflect upon Zinoviev’s and Kamenev’s statement in thenon-Party press, the more self-evident it becomes that theiraction is strike-breaking in the full sense of the term. Kamenev’sevasion at the meeting of the Petrograd Soviet issomething really despicable. He is, don’t you see, in fullagreement with Trotsky. But is it so difficult to understandthat in the face of the enemy, Trotsky could not have said,he had no right to say, and should not have said more thanhe did? Is it so difficult to understand that it is a dutyto the Party which has concealed its decision from the enemy(on the necessity for an armed uprising, on the fact that thetime for it is fully ripe, on the thorough preparations to bemade for it, etc.), and it is this decision that makes it obligatoryin public statements to fasten not only the “blame”, butalso the initiative upon the adversary? Only a child could failto understand that. Kamenev’s evasion is a sheer fraud. Thesame must be said of Zinoviev’s evasion, at least of his letterof “justification” (written, I think, to the Central Organ),which is the only document I have seen (for, as to a dissentingopinion, “an alleged dissenting opinion”, which hasbeen trumpeted in the bourgeois press, I, a member of theCentral Committee, have to this very day seen nothing of it).Among Zinoviev’s “arguments” there is this: Lenin, he says,sent out his letters “before any decisions were adopted”,and you did not protest. That is literally what Zinoviev