page 203

    The German comrades often have occasion to read reports of bitter struggles and fundamental divergencies inside the R.S.D.L.P. Unfortunately, such reports originate from particular groups of political exiles. In most cases they come from people who are either absolutely unfamiliar with the actual state of affairs in Russia at the present time or deliberately seek to mislead the German comrades by a one-sided presentation of party politics. Every such group of exiles has its own special "trend", but in reality it consists of people who have lost all living contact with the fighting Russian workers' Party or have never had such contact. Unfortunately, one of this kind of "informants" succeeded in winning the confidence of Vorwärts. The Central Organ of the German Social-Democratic Party in a series of articles opened its columns to a torrent of unheard-of slander against the Russian Party, poured out from the pen of that informant and supposed to be derived from "objective" sources.

    Actually, those sources were "subjective" and false through and through. Since Vorwärts did not insert our factual correction, we had to issue a separate pamphlet entitled The Anonymous Writer in Vorwärts and the State of Affairs in the R.S.D.L.P.,* which was issued in several hundred copies and was sent to the executive committees of all the German Party organisations of any importance and to the editors of the major organs of the Party press.

    As far as the factual evidence of the pamphlet is concerned, Vorwärts was unable to raise a single objection, and thereby tacitly accepted it.

 
page 204

    To enable our German Party comrades to appraise the authenticity of certain reports reaching them, we quote here a letter which the Central Committee of the R.S.D.L.P. sent to the Executive Committee of the German Social-Democratic Party. The Letts had suggested that the Executive should arrange a joint meeting of eleven "centres" on the question of material support for the election campaign, whereupon the Executive asked those centres about their attitude to the matter. The letter is the answer given by the Central Committee, and it reads as follows:

 
July 30, 1912[*]

page 625




NOTES



  ^[105] The pamphlet The Present Situation in the R.S.D.L.P., written by Lenin in Cracow, was first published in the German language in Leipzig in September 1912. Its main point is the letter of the C.C. of the R.S.D.L.P. written on July 16-17 (29-30). The letter was a reply to the appeal of the Executive of the German Social-Democratic Party on the convening of the R.S.D.L.P. "centres" and "groups" abroad to distribute the funds which the leadership of the German Social-Democratic Party had allotted for the Fourth Duma election campaign. The C.C. of the R.S.D.L.P. refused to participate in the meeting, and the meeting did not take place. The Executive of the German Social-Democrats assigned part of the funds to the liquidators' Organising Committee and Caucasian Regional Committee, to the Bund and to the Central Committee of the Lettish Social-Democratic Party, thereby backing the liquidators against the Bolsheviks. The pamphlet Concerning the Present Situation in the R.S.D.L.P. was circulated by the editors of Sotsial-Demokrat to the regional and district centres of the German Social-Democratic Party, the delegates of the Party Congress held in Chemnitz in September 1912, and the editors of the major Social-Democratic newspapers of Germany.    [p. 203]

  ^[106] The phrase "Potemkin villages " was coined in the first quarter of the nineteenth century to denote a sham facade of prosperity. During Catherine II's journey to the South in 1878 G. A. Potemkin, Governor-General of the Yekaterinoslav Vicegerency, created an impression of exceptional prosperity by having decorative villages, arches, etc., built and parks laid out along the route of the Empress.    [p. 206]

  ^[107] The Spilka (Ukrainian Social-Democratic Union ) arose late in 1904 having broken away from the petty-bourgeois, nationalist Revolutionary-Ukrainian Party. It entered the R.S.D.L.P. as an autonomous regional organisation. In the inner-Party struggle of the R.S.D.L.P. it sided with the Mensheviks. It broke up in the period of reaction. In 1912 there were only small disconnected groups of the Spilka and by then most of its members had become bourgeois nationalists. Trotsky's liquidationist Pravda (Vienna) was published as an organ of the Spilka only in October and December 1908 (the first two issues).    [p. 207]

  ^[108] The Ninth International Socialist Congress of the Second International was to meet in Vienna in the autumn of 1913, but the war which broke out in the Balkans in 1912 and the threat of a world war prompted the International Socialist Bureau to convene an extraordinary congress in Basle on November 24-25, 1912.    [p. 216]

  ^[109] This refers to the August conference of the liquidators, which met in Vienna in August 1912 and formed the anti-Party August bloc.

 
page 626

The bloc was organised by Trotsky. The conference was attended by delegates from the Bund, the Caucasian Regional Committee, the Social-Democratic Party of the Lettish Territory and small liquidationist groups abroad: the editors of Golos Sotsial-Demokrata, Trotsky's Vienna Pravda and the Vperyod group. Delegates from Russia were sent by the St. Petersburg and Moscow "initiating groups" of the liquidators and the editorial boards of the liquidationist Nasha Zarya and Nevsky Golos. A representative of the Spilka Committee Abroad was present too. The overwhelming majority of the delegates were people who lived abroad and were out of touch with the working class of Russia.
    The conference adopted anti-Party liquidationist decisions on all the questions of Social-Democratic tactics and declared against the existence of the illegal Party.
    Being composed of heterogeneous elements, the August bloc began to fall apart even while the conference was meeting. The liquidators were unable to elect a Central Committee and limited themselves to setting up an Organising Committee. The blows delivered by the Bolsheviks soon resulted in the final disintegration of the bloc.    [p. 217]