Lenin To Camille Huysmans

V. I.   Lenin

To Camille Huysmans

Proletarskaya Revolutsia No. 3 (26). Published according to the manuscript.

Lenin Collected Works,  Volume 20, pages 74-81.

At your personal request I am writing the following brief report (bref rapport) in my own name, and apologise in advance for any gaps in this report (rapport), as I am hard pressed for time. The Central Committee of our Party will probably find occasion to send its own official report[1] to the Executive Committee of the International Socialist Bureau, and to correct any possible errors in my own private report.

What are the differences (dissentiments) between the Central Committee of our Party and the Organizing Committee? That is the question. These differences may be reduced to the following six points:

I

The Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party was formed in 1898 as an illegal Party, and has always remained such. Today too our Party can exist only as an illegal Party, since in Russia even the party of the moderate liberals has not been legalised.

Until the 1905 Revolution in Russia, however, the liberals published an illegal organ abroad.[2] When the revolution was defeated, the liberals turned their backs upon it and indignantly rejected the idea of an illegal press. And so after the revolution the idea arose in the opportunist wing of our Party of renouncing the illegal Party, of liquidating it (hence the name “liquidators”) and of substituting for it a legal (“open”) party.

On two occasions, in 1908 and in 1910, our entire Party condemned liquidationism[3] formally and unqualifiedly. On   this point the differences are absolutely irreconcilable. It is impossible to restore and build up an illegal Party with people who do not believe in it and have no desire at all to build it up.

The Organising Committee and the Conference of August 1912[4] which elected it, recognise the illegal Party in word. In deed, however, after the decisions of the August Conference, the liquidators’ newspaper in Russia (Luch and Novaya Rabochaya Gazeta in 1912–13), continued to attack, in the legal press, the very existence of the illegal Party (numerous articles by L.S., F.D., Zasulich, and others).

Thus, we disagree with the Organising Committee because the latter is a fiction, which in word denies that it is liquidationist, but in fact screens and whitewashes the liquidators’ group in Russia.

We disagree with the Organising Committee because the latter is unwilling (and unable, for it is helpless against the liquidators’ group) to condemn liquidationism emphatically and irrevocably.

We cannot build up an illegal Party except by fighting those who attack it in the legal press. In Russia there are now (since 1912) two St. Petersburg workers’ dailies: one fulfils and carries out the decisions of the illegal Party (Pravda). The other (Luch and Novaya Rabochaya Gazeta) attacks the illegal Party, defies it, and tries to convince the workers that it is unnecessary. Unity between the illegal Party and the group that is fighting against the existence of the illegal Party is impossible until the paper run by the liquidators’ group radically changes its line, or until the Organising Committee emphatically condemns it and breaks with it.

II

Our differences with the liquidators are the same as those between reformists and revolutionaries everywhere. However, these differences are greatly aggravated and made irreconcilable by the fact that the liquidators, in the legal press, fight against revolutionary slogans. Unity is impossible with a group which, for example, declares in the legal press that the slogan of a republic, or of the confiscation of   the big landed estates, is unsuitable for agitation among the masses. In the legal press we cannot refute such propaganda, which is objectively tantamount to betraying socialism and making concessions to liberalism and the monarchy.

And the Russian monarchy is such that a few more revolutions will be needed to teach the Russian tsars constitutionalism.

There can be no unity between our illegal Party, which secretly organises revolutionary strikes and demonstrations, and the group of publicists who in the legal press call the strike movement a “strike craze”.