Published:
Pravda No. 68, June 10 (May 28), 1917.
Published according to the text in Pravda.
Source:
Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
1964,
Moscow,
Volume 24,
pages 531-532.
Translated: Isaacs Bernard
Transcription\Markup:
B. Baggins and D. Walters
Public Domain:
Lenin Internet Archive
1999
(2005).
You may freely copy, distribute,
display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and
commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet
Archive” as your source.
Today is the second and principal day of the elections, The most importunate in offering themselves to the electorate, besides the Cadets, are the united Mensheviks and Narodniks.
What answer did they have to our accusation concerning their shameful bloc with Yedinstvo? Are they prepared to defend this bloc on grounds of principle?
They are not.
In reply to our suggestion that the bloc with Yedinstvo was a disgrace, Rabochaya Gazeta quotes the example of—whom would you think?—of the agent provocateur Malinovsky and of his being smuggled into the Duma by the secret police!
The dishonesty of such a “method” of controversy is dealt with elsewhere [in this edition] in a separate paragraph.[1] Here we are concerned with “Rabochaya Gazeta’s” logic rather than its dishonesty. Look what you do, gentlemen! You parry our reference to “your” Yedinstvo by a counter-reference to “our” agent provocateur Malinovsky! What is the inference? The inference is that you consider Yedinstvo on a par with an agent provocateur!
That is how the wise heads of Rabochaya Gazeta “defend” the bloc with Yedinstvo. Very clever of them, to be sure. When told that they have in free Russia such a disgraceful colleague as Plekhanov’s Yedinstvo, they answer: And the Bolsheviks, in tsarist Russia, had the agent provocateur Malinovsky! Isn’t this a gem of a defence?
Dyelo Naroda, too, has put its toot into it in regard to Yedinstvo. On May 27, the first day of the elections, this paper of Kerensky, Chernov and Co. carried a front-page appeal to vote for the lists in which “Yedinstvo” is smuggled in.
And on the second page of the same issue of Dyelo Naroda we read a lengthy denunciation of the “social-patriot” Plekhanov and his Yedinstvo, containing, among others, the following “vitriolic remark”:
“We will gladly inform our readers what other liberal- and social-imperialist—‘Rech’, ‘Russkaya Volya’ and ‘Yedinsstvo’—think about the Italian annexation [of Albania].”
A gem, is it not?
The “Socialist-Revolutionaries” call on the people to vote for lists in which the candidates of Yedinstvo are concealed, the very same “Yedinstvo” which the Socialist-Revolutionaries themselves, and on election day at that, call ’social imperialist”, i.e., socialist in word and ’imperialist in deed”, the very same Yedinstvo which they identify with Rech and Russkaya Volya.
The wise Rabochaya Gazeta, in a bloc with the wise Dyelo Naroda, has certainly “defended” Yedinstvo today.
And Plekhanov accepts alms from people who “accidentally” compare him with Malinovsky, or, on election day, openly declare him to be a “social-imperialist”.
Such is the exhibition which this disgraceful bloc of the Mensheviks plus Narodniks plus Yedinstvo is making of itself.
Workers and soldiers! All toiling people! Not a single vote to the Narodniks and Mensheviks, who are trying to drag in the “social-imperialists”!
Vote for the Bolsheviks!
[1] [PLACEHOLDER.] —Lenin
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