Collected Works of V. I. Lenin - Vol. 3 - From Marx to Mao

UNCRITICAL CRITICISM
623
payments will be not nearly but actually uniform in size.
The whole point is that Mr. Ilyin does not know which
village community he is talking about. To finish with
Mr. Ilyin’s abuse of the Zemstvo statistics,” etc. . . (2292). I
would like very much to know whether another example
could be found in scientific literature of this sort of criticism.
Having acquainted ourselves with the methods by which
Mr. Skvortsov “has proved” the utter “worthlessness” of the
budget data I have given, we may presumably ignore the
potent (and impotent) terms in which the critic expresses
his dissatisfaction with the very use of budget data. In
demanding mass data on budgets, Mr. Skvortsov is evidently
talking again about something that has nothing to do
with the case, for descriptions of specific farms, such as I
made use of, never are and never can be of a mass nature.
The literature relating to the budgets of specific farms is
indicated by me at the beginning of the section criticised,
and I would, of course, only be grateful to the critic if he
supplemented or corrected me. But Mr. Skvortsov knows
how to “criticise” without touching on the substance of the
point at issue! I attempted to prove that the budgets were
typical by comparing the average sizes of family, crop area,
land rented and number of animals per horseless and onehorse
households, according to the budget data and the
“mass data” (p. 158 of my book); but our stern critic simply
calls this a “curiosity”—on what grounds, nobody knows. Perhaps
for the same reason that a certain “critic” found the name
Chichikov so funny? The budgets “are not typical . . . if only
because the disposal of . . . grain . . . from the autumn
onwards and its acquisition in the spring are very rarely met
with in Voronezh Gubernia, whereas for the whole of Russia”
such disposal has been proved to be the case, supposedly,
by Mr. Nik. —on (2291). It is a true proverb which says that
les beaux esprits se rencontrent*: That “genuine” Marxist,
Mr. Pavel Skvortsov, coming up against a contradiction
between the assertions of the “genuine” Marxist, Mr. Nikolai
—on, and Zemstvo statistical data, unhesitatingly settles
the problem along the lines that the data are not typical,
and not that Mr. Nik. —on’s statements are wrong, or too
* All great minds think alike.—Ed.