Put Pravdy No. 25, |
Published according to |
From V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, 4th English Edition,
Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1964
Vol. 20, pp. 129-28.
Translated from the Russian
by Bernard Isaacs
and Joe Fineberg
Edited by Julius Katzer
page 129
Put Pravdy (No. 18) of last Friday published an article entitled "Mr. Struve on the Need to 'Reform the Government'"[*] in which we informed our readers of the appraisal of the political situation in Russia given by one of the most outspoken and consistent of the counter-revolutionary liberals.
The next day Rech published a tremendously long "doctrinal" article by Mr. Milyukov "against" Mr. Struve in connection with this very article on the need to reform the government. It will be useful to dwell on this dispute between the two liberals, firstly, because vital issues of Russian politics are involved, and secondly, because it reveals the two political types of leading bourgeois. And they are types that will have important political significance in Russia for a long time to come, for decades, types that are of similar significance in all capitalist countries. In its own interests, the proletariat must know these types.
During the past few years Mr. Struve has set forth his views most fully and clearly in the book Vekhi.[82] These are the views of a counter-revolutionary liberal, an adherent of religion (and of philosophical idealism as the truest and most "scholarly" road to it), and an opponent of democracy. They are the clear, distinctly expressed views, not of an individual, but of a class, for as a matter of fact the entire mass of the Octobrist and Cadet bourgeoisie in Russia during 1907-14 subscribed to them.
Notes on |
page 582
[82]
See Note 71.
[Note 71 --
(page 579)
Vekhists -- participants of the symposium Vekhi (Landmarks ) -- a collection of articles by prominent Cadet publicists representing the counter-revolutionary liberal bourgeoisie: N. A. Berdayev, S. N. Bulgakov, M. O. Herschensohn, A. S. Izgoyev, B. A. Kistyakovsky, P. B. Struve and S. L. Frank. Issued in Moscow in the spring of 1909.
In articles on the Russian intelligentsia the Vekhists tried to malign the revolutionary-democratic traditions of the Russian nation's finest sons, among them V. G. Belinsky and N. G. Chernyshevsky. They vilified the revolutionary movement of 1905 and thanked the tsarist government for having saved the bourgeoisie from "the fury of the people" "with its bayonets and jails". The symposium called upon the intelligentsia to serve the autocracy. Lenin compared the Vekhi programme in philosophy and journalism with that of the Black-Hundred newspaper Moskovskiye Vedomosti, and called the symposium "an encyclopaedia of liberal renegacy", "nothing but a flood of reactionary mud poured on democracy". (See present edition, Vol. 16, p. 453.) [Transcriber's Note: The editor's reference here is to an endnote (Note 21) to Lenin's "The Election in St. Petersburg" where the editor of that text had presented the above characterisations before directing the reader to their origin in Lenin's "Concerning Vekhi".]]
[p. 129]