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

IN MEMORY OF COUNT HEYDEN53class politics—the influence of this bourgeois intelligentsiaon the people is dangerous. Here, and here alone, do we finda contamination of the masses that is capable of doing realharm and that calls for the utmost exertion of all the forcesof socialism to counteract this poison.“Heyden was an educated, cultured, humane, and tolerantman”—ecstatically exclaim the liberal and democraticdroolers, imagining that they have raised themselves aboveall “partisanship” to the standpoint “common to all mankind”.You are mistaken, most worthy sirs. This is not a standpointcommon to all mankind but a common servile standpoint.The slave who is aware of his slavish condition andfights it is a revolutionary. The slave who is not aware ofhis slavish condition and vegetates in silent, unenlightened,and wordless slavery, is just a slave. The slave who droolswhen smugly describing the delights of slavish existenceand who goes into ecstasies over his good and kind masteris a grovelling boor. And you, gentlemen of Tovarishch,are just such boors. With disgusting complacency you waxsentimental over the fact that a counter-revolutionary landlord,who supported the counter-revolutionary government,was an educated and humane man. You do not realise thatinstead of turning the slave into a revolutionary you areturning slaves into grovellers. All your talk about freedomand democracy is sheer claptrap, parrot phrases, fashionabletwaddle, or hypocrisy. It is just a painted signboard.And you yourselves are whited sepulchres. You are meanspiritedboors, and your education, culture, and enlightenmentare only a species of thoroughgoing prostitution.For you are selling your souls, and you are selling themnot through need, but for “love of the thing”.Heyden was a convinced constitutionalist, you say sentimentally.You are lying, or else you have been completelyhoodwinked by the Heydens. Publicly, before thepeople, to call a man a convinced constitutionalist whenthat man is known to have founded a party which supportedthe government of Witte, Dubasov, Goremykin, andStolypin, is like calling a cardinal a convinced opponentof the pope. Instead of giving the people a correctidea of the constitution you, the democrats, treat the con-