Collected Works of V. I. Lenin - Vol. 13 - From Marx to Mao

38V. I. LENINof the party of the proletariat in relation to the revolutionarytraditions of a given country strikingly contrasted.The aim of reaction is to blot out these traditions, to representthe revolution as “elemental madness”—Struve’stranslation of the German das tolle Jahr (“the mad year”—the term applied by the German police-minded bourgeoishistorians, and even more widely by German universityprofessorialhistoriography, to the year 1848). The aim ofreaction is to make the people forget the forms of struggle,the forms of organisation, and the ideas and slogans whichthe revolutionary period begot in such profusion and variety.Just as those obtuse eulogists of English philistinism,the Webbs, try to represent Chartism, the revolutionaryperiod of the English labour movement, as pure childishness,as “sowing wild oats”, as a piece of naïveté unworthyof serious attention, as an accidental and abnormal deviation,so too the German bourgeois historians treat the year1848 in Germany. Such also is the attitude of the reactionariesto the Great French Revolution, which, by the fiercehatred it still inspires, demonstrates to this day the vitalityand force of its influence on humanity. And in thesame way our heroes of counter-revolution, particularly“democrats” of yesterday like Struve, Milyukov, Kiesewetter,and tutti quanti vie with one another in scurrilouslyslandering the revolutionary traditions of the Russian revolution.Although it is barely two years since the directmass struggle of the proletariat won that particle of freedomwhich sends the liberal lackeys of the old regime into suchraptures, a vast trend calling itself liberal (!!) has alreadyarisen in our publicist literature. This trend is fosteredby the Cadet press and is wholly devoted to depicting ourrevolution, revolutionary methods of struggle, revolutionaryslogans, and revolutionary traditions as somethingbase, primitive, naïve, elemental, mad, etc. ... even criminal... from Milyukov to Kamyshansky il n’y a qu’un pas!*On the other hand, the successes of reaction, which firstdrove the people from the Soviets of Workers’ and Peasants’Deputies into the Dubasov-Stolypin Dumas, and is now* There is only one step.—Ed.