First published in: Nevskii sbornik, St Petersburg: Epokha, 1906
Source: Lev Kamenev, Mezhdu dvumya revolyutsiyami, 2nd edition, Moscow: Novaya Moskva, 1923, pp. 3–17
Translation and notes by: Edmund Griffiths (2026).
Markup by: Graham Seaman for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Licence: Creative Commons CC-BY. To satisfy this license you need only acknowledge MIA as the source of the material and Edmund Griffiths as the translator, and provide a link to this page.
File uploaded: August 2026.
In 1883, in the first Russian social-democratic pamphlet, published by the first Russian social-democratic group, the first Russian social-democratic theorist—G. V. Plekhanov—wrote that Russian socialists ‘must concern themselves with changing the factual relations of Russian social forces in favour of the working class even in the pre-constitutional period’. ‘Otherwise,’ he says, ‘the fall of absolutism will by no means justify the hopes placed in it by the Russian socialists or even democrats’.[1] What did this expression of Plekhanov’s, that the bourgeois revolution will not justify the hopes placed in it by social democrats, mean? What hopes do social democrats place in the bourgeois revolution, and in what sense might it justify them? Plekhanov himself had cause to address this question in connection with the famine of 1891–92, when he turned to the concrete question of socialists’ tasks in combating the disaster. In 1892, Plekhanov wrote: ‘having risen up against the existing order, the people must conquer political rights for themselves and not political privileges for their exploiters’. He at once made clear that this outcome of the revolution, an outcome favourable to the proletariat, depends on the degree of development of the proletariat’s class consciousness. And he systematized these two sides of what is one and the same process: ‘no other course will lead so quickly to victory over absolutism’ (and, the author might have added, to such a complete victory) ‘as that which unites within itself... the struggle for political freedom with the promotion of the growth of proletarian class consciousness.’[2] The question of different methods for abolishing absolutism, and the different value of their results, was thus posed sharply and decisively. It remained to give an equally precise and decisive answer to the question of what position the proletariat must occupy, within the combination of forces arrayed against the existing regime, to guarantee it the greatest possible results from the old regime’s abolition. And Plekhanov did not hesitate to give this answer. Eight years after the pamphlet we have just quoted, and seventeen years after the pamphlet Socialism and the Political Struggle, he wrote an article for the first issue of Zarya under the title ‘Once More Socialism and the Political Struggle’. This came at a time when, in the words of Plekhanov’s comrade-in-arms Starover (A. N. Potresov), ‘it was all too obvious that the party of the conscious proletariat would enter the struggle against its mighty adversary not one-on-one but in a complex combination of various social groups, pursuing various goals and each demanding its share of the legacy from the dying regime’. What tactics would guarantee the proletariat its ‘share of the legacy’? Plekhanov’s answer was decisive: ‘Our party will take it upon itself to initiate the struggle against absolutism, and, consequently, it will also take upon itself the hegemony in this struggle’. And he closed his article, written to argue for this tactic of hegemony, with the following energetic words: ‘The tactic I have defended in this article would inevitably give Russian social democracy—this advance detachment of the Russian working class—hegemony in the liberation struggle against autocracy’. The task that Plekhanov posed to the party of the proletariat was clear; and, when he formulated it in this way, he undoubtedly shared the viewpoint of all those who regard whatever promotes the growth of proletarian class consciousness as helpful for our cause, and whatever retards it as harmful.
Now let us try to see what methods Plekhanov thinks should be used to realize this hegemony in the concrete conditions of the Russian revolution. How does Plekhanov resolve the task that he himself posed; and is he resolving this task at all, or has he, without noticing it, substituted for it some different one? Plekhanov’s Dnevnik [3] provides irreplaceable material for our purpose. Three issues respond to the vitally urgent questions of Russian revolutionary reality, during four months that have been exceptionally interesting and exceptionally rich in experience. Issues 3 and 4 contain reflections on the tactics that would enable social democrats to make the greatest possible use of the situation created by the October strikes: issue 3, written before the November strikes, examines what ought to be done, while issue 4, released after the December uprisings, criticizes what was done. Plekhanov’s tactical views should thus have received a very complete expression.
The day after 17 October 1905,[4] Plekhanov wrote: ‘... The servants of reaction will soon tear the fruits of the proletariat’s first victory out of its hands, unless it is followed by new and even more decisive defeats of Tsarism’. Plekhanov was right, as events showed: the content of the succeeding months of the Russian revolution was an intense struggle between attempts by the reaction—which soon took the form of counter-revolution—to regain everything it had lost in October, and a ceaselessly developing popular movement which also soon took the form of armed resistance to these attempts.
So, foreseeing these reactionary attempts, what should the social democracy have done? Firstly, says Plekhanov in issue 3, it needed to make use of ‘the dissension between the bourgeoisie and Tsarism’ to help the success of the workers’ movement; secondly, it needed to pay increased attention to the peasantry; thirdly, it needed to avoid tactless behaviour that would set the ‘constitutional monarchists’[5] against it again; fourthly and finally, it needed to avoid flippant chatter about an uprising.
The main error in this advice—the error that made it ‘useless’ in the reality of the Russian revolution—is clear. It is the fact that the struggle between the people and the reaction took the form of open civil war. This possibility was outside Plekhanov’s field of vision: nothing else can explain the insignificant attention he pays to forms of proletarian fighting organization such as the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies, to facts such as the emergence of elements of local revolutionary power, etc., etc. The meaning of this whole colossal movement remained obscure to Plekhanov, and so it is no surprise that in issue 4, criticizing the social democracy’s tactics during those days, he could only repeat in December the same advice he had given in October. Events proved powerless to change the abstract positions Plekhanov had worked out in issue 3, or to make him concretize them. November and December—the activity of the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies and the armed uprising—had taught him nothing.
Pick up Dnevnik 4, and you will find just the same reflections about how reactionary attempts should have been answered by increased agitation among the backward strata of the proletariat, by systematic agitation for the creation of trade unions, by attracting sympathy from the non-proletarian classes, and by strengthening social democracy’s influence among the peasant masses, and about how ‘they should not have taken up arms’ because the victory of the uprising was not guaranteed.
One day, when all the enormous work of organization and agitation accomplished by the social democracy in those days of civil war comes to light, Plekhanov will discover how highly the social democracy assessed the importance both of agitation among the backward strata of the proletariat and of organizing trade unions, and what massive energy it put into this work.[6] And at that point Plekhanov will probably also realize that talking about an uprising in October and November was a long way from being ‘flippant chatter’...
We shall therefore leave this part of Plekhanov’s advice on one side. Out of the four cardinal points we have noted from his advice—to which he added nothing following the December days, using that experience merely to illustrate them,—the most interesting thing for our purposes is to understand how Plekhanov intended to make use of ‘the dissension between the bourgeoisie and Tsarism’. This is the single point where Plekhanov’s understanding of the proletariat’s tasks and role in the Russian revolution finds clear expression.
Plekhanov starts from premises that are entirely correct and are acknowledged by all. ‘Our bourgeoisie’, he writes, ‘wants political liberty, but it does not want revolution’. ‘For the bourgeoisie to make peace with the monarchy, it is necessary that our political order should be brought at least partly, at least halfway (italics ours—L.K.) into accordance with our economic relations, which are characterized by the dominance of capital’. Until then our bourgeoisie will remain discontented, and this ‘political discontent of our bourgeoisie is highly advantageous for the cause of the Russian revolution’, concludes Plekhanov. This is indisputable: it is the basic premise of the Marxist understanding of the Russian revolution. So, what follows from it?
What follows is that the social democracy must choose its tactics so as to help deepen this conflict, deepen this discontent, radicalize the bourgeoisie’s demands on our political order. We must help divide the government from the bourgeoisie, says Plekhanov. How can we do it?
Plekhanov knows that the bourgeoisie is pushed into the arms of the government, towards the idea of a ‘strong authority’, principally by the independent revolutionary activity of the proletariat. And for him the answer is surprisingly simple: the proletariat must not push the bourgeoisie away with its ‘tactless antics’.
In reality, the process of the bourgeoisie’s radicalization is somewhat more complicated. One of the Russian revolution’s specific features, arising from the social and class structure of Russian society in the revolutionary period, is that our feudal-serf setup is dying not under the blows of ‘one nation’—as our apologists for the bourgeoisie dream, and necessarily must dream, with such ‘idealistic’ enthusiasm—but in the gulf that yawns between the industrial bourgeoisie and the proletariat, on the one hand, and between the landed nobility and the peasantry on the other. And there is to need to recall the process, familiar to everyone, of our bourgeois parties working out their programmes, the bourgeoisie’s political self-determination taking place before our very eyes, to realize that the the radicalization of bourgeois demands and the involvement of the bourgeoisie in political struggle are taking place under the immediate pressure of proletarian action. It is only as the bourgeoise has become convinced of the present political system’s inability to guarantee the regular extraction of surplus value that it has put forward the demand for reform. It is only as it has become convinced, in the course of the revolution, that the system does not benefit it, that the idea of taking the reorganization of this system into its own hands has ripened. It is only as its certainty has grown, under the immediate pressure of the intensifying and radicalizing movement of the proletariat, that the old government cannot secure ‘law and order’, those indispensable elements of normal commodity circulation, that its decisiveness regarding its relations with the old order has also grown. And it is only as the class movement of the proletariat goes on to advance a broader and broader set of demands against the present system that the radicalism of the bourgeoisie’s demands and the decisiveness of its tactics will increase too. In the end, the desire to secure ‘law and order’ will force the bourgeoisie to drag itself along behind the demands of the labouring mass, force it at every stage of the popular movement to seek a compromise between the old government and the demands that the popular movement puts forward, flinging it into the arms now of the reaction and now of the revolution, but at the same time inserting an ever broader social content into bourgeois law and order as social, class conflicts develop within the ‘nation’ that is liberating itself. Bourgeois political thought only formulates the framework of ‘law and order’: the widening of that framework depends directly on the logic of the proletariat’s class struggle against the bourgeoisie itself. Thus, our bourgeoisie’s revolutionary and oppositional thought merely registers the widening gulf that proletarian class struggle is creating. As that gulf grows, so too does the political content that the bourgeoisie puts into the formula of ‘law and order’. The bourgeoisie is driven forward in its demands by none other than the independent revolutionary action of the proletariat.
Clearly, this is nothing like Plekhanov’s notion about scaring the liberals away with ‘tactless antics’. And one feels sorry for the beautiful and very instructive quotations from the Communist Manifesto that adorn Plekhanov’s Dnevnik, without doing anything to help prove his point about the harm that our ‘tactlessness’, according to Plekhanov, has single-handedly done to the Russian revolution.
Before us we have two paths for utilizing bourgeois discontent in the interests of the Russian revolution. One path—which the Russian revolution has taken so far, attracting Plekhanov’s disapproval in the process (see Dnevnik 4)—is the path of developing the proletarian class movement, without taking the liberal’s fear or friendliness as its main criterion, and thereby inevitably radicalizing the liberal’s attitude to the present order. The other path, Plekhanov’s path, is the path on which he hopes to attract liberal sympathy.
Plekhanov likes to compare Bolshevik tactics to the tactics of the German ‘true socialists’, criticized so harshly and so justly by Marx. Marx condemned the ‘true socialists’ for counterposing socialist demands to the political movement, for ‘preaching to the masses that they had nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by this bourgeois movement’. This is the quotation that Plekhanov thought it necessary to present for the edification of Russian social democrats. But what is the situation in this country? Do we counterpose socialist demands to the political movement? Do Russian social democrats preach that the proletariat has nothing to gain from the ongoing revolution, which is undoubtedly bourgeois in character? No. And even Plekhanov admits it. In this respect, the situation regarding liberals and bourgeois values is quite satisfactory. All social democrats agree that the proletariat may gain more from this movement or less, depending on its tactics and the level of its class development, but it will certainly gain something; and it has nothing to lose.
Realizing that in this regard there is no threat of any social-democratic ‘tactlessness’ towards the bourgeois movement, Plekhanov goes further on his path of attracting liberal sympathy towards the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat. Is our so-called ‘ultimate goal’ not a hindrance? ‘Our ultimate goal will not push the advanced elements of our society away from us, provided we can make our immediate political task thoroughly clear to them’, writes Plekhanov. Something odd has certainly happened to Plekhanov here. Because our ‘immediate political task’ is to create the political and social conditions for the most successful and energetic possible struggle for socialism. To make this ‘thoroughly clear’ would simply mean making clear this indissoluble link between our ‘immediate task’ and our ‘ultimate goal’. Isolating the ‘ultimate goal’ from the ‘immediate task’ would conceal not only the task’s meaning for us, but also its objective content. Our ‘ultimate goal’ leaves a profound mark on the scale and content of our ‘immediate task’; if Plekhanov wants to attract the sympathy of liberalism, he will evidently need not only to ‘make the task thoroughly clear’ but also to erase this mark. In any case, he will need to ‘make clear’ the link between the ‘ultimate goal’ and the ‘immediate task’ in a rather idiosyncratic way—one that is hardly habitual for a revolutionary social democrat.
And yet we still think this will be of little help. Our assurance comes from Plekhanov himself.
On the preceding page, he describes the liberals’ attitude towards the Narodnaya Volya.[7] According to Plekhanov, its members believed a revolution that overthrew Tsarism would lead to the beginning of socialist organization. Therefore, ‘insofar as the liberals took the Narodnaya Volya programme seriously (italics Plekhanov’s), they had to come (italics ours—L.K.) to the conviction that their interests diverged from those of the revolutionaries in the most essential way’. That is on the one hand. On the other hand, if the liberals did feel a certain sympathy for the Narodnaya Volya, it was only because its prophecies ‘struck them as a childish utopia, posing no serious danger to the bourgeois economic order’.
Does it not occur to Plekhanov that he too is facing just the same dilemma? Either the liberals will take our ‘prophecies’ about class struggle and its development after Tsarism has been removed from the arena seriously, in which case they will have to come to the conviction, etc., just as in the story Plekhanov tells; or else we ourselves, so as not to frighten them, will have to paint our ‘ultimate goal’ and our ideas about the future development of the class struggle in the colours of a ‘childish utopia, posing no’, and so forth.
Be that as it may, even once Plekhanov has relegated the ‘ultimate goal’ to a sphere far from the bitterness of current political struggle, even when he has isolated the proletariat’s political task from the ‘ultimate goal’, he still has to take account of how the bourgeoise and the proletariat are ‘counterposed’ on the basis of actual political programmes and actions.
For now, we shall just note that the attempt to make use of the bourgeoisie’s political discontent in the interests of the Russian revolution by following Plekhanov’s recipe led him at the very outset, quite unavoidably, to get rid of that inconvenient witness, the ‘ultimate goal’—that is, it led him to the necessity of narrowing the Russian revolution’s social content. If the Russian social democracy had taken Plekhanov’s advice, it would have meant that it had forgotten the great behest of Marx. In the very same Manifesto, Marx wrote that the communists ‘never cease, for a single instant, to instill into the workers the clearest possible understanding of the hostile antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat’. And this cannot be done, especially at the moment of a bourgeois revolution, without making clear the links between the proletariat’s immediate tasks in this revolution and its ultimate goal. And that frightens the liberals. And Plekhanov does not want that. And so he evades the question by saying, oh, the practical activists aren’t doing it properly, they’re spoiling everything.
But what follows from Plekhanov’s notions about the ‘ultimate goal’? It follows that insofar as social democrats’ hopes rest not on the sympathy of the liberals but on the development of the workers’ class consciousness, the way to make use of the dissension between the government and the bourgeoisie lies on a different plane. It will happen the more energetically, the clearer the link between their current tasks and their ultimate goals becomes in the workers’ heads and the more powerfully the class struggle within the nation that is liberating itself therefore unfolds.
But let us trace how Plekhanov’s thought develops.
Having disposed of the ‘counterposition’ between the political movement and socialist demands, as practised by the German ‘true socialists’, and of the counterposition between the ‘ultimate goal’ and the ‘immediate political task’, as practised by the author of the Dnevnik himself, Plekhanov reaches the heart of the matter: the counterposition between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat on the ground of the ongoing political struggle, of the political demands and tactics practised by the Russian revolution and elucidated for the broad masses of the proletariat by the Russian social democracy.
Plekhanov is very unhappy with this counterposition: in his eyes, revolutionary social democrats’ ‘tactlessness’ takes on the character of a real disaster. ‘We understand the words “counterposition between ourselves and the bourgeoisie” extremely superficially, we are pushing our liberals and our democrats away from us just where, in the interests of the cause, we should be attracting them to us’, says Plekhanov. In his words, this prevents ‘the liberal and democratic bourgeoisie from becoming imbued with sympathy towards us social democrats’. So what must be done to gain this sympathy?
As we have seen, our immediate political task must be made thoroughly clear to them. ‘In addition, we should elucidate for them and remind them (the bourgeoisie—L.K.) that they have an interest of their own in the fall of absolutism and that they should therefore support the proletariat’s revolutionary efforts insofar as these are directed against the existing political order’. We shall leave on one side the question of how we are to remind the bourgeoisie of its interest in the fall of absolutism: we already know that Plekhanov’s path and the real movement diverge here. The proletariat was doing it throughout the whole preceding period of the Russian revolution, by heightening its demands and thus pushing the bourgeoisie into grasping the idea that the old government is incapable of guaranteeing normal development. On this point Plekhanov does not go beyond an unproductive phrase.
But there is another question, and everything that follows is built on obscuring it. The idea of making the proletariat’s immediate political task clear to the bourgeoisie is unobtrusively replaced by the idea of elucidating for the bourgeoisie its own interest in the fall of absolutism. But it cannot be a secret to Plekhanov that the bourgeoisie’s interest in the fall of absolutism is not the same as the proletariat’s, that ‘the fall of absolutism' has a different content for the bourgeoisie from what it has for the proletariat, that the concept ‘the proletariat’s immediate task’ and the meaning that the bourgeoisie puts into ‘the fall of absolutism’ are far from coinciding, and that the bourgeoisie therefore has an interest in a particular method of struggle with absolutism and is ‘scared off’ by the methods that actually give the proletariat its best guarantee of resolving its own immediate task.[8] Plekhanov writes that the bourgeoisie should support the proletariat insofar as its efforts are directed against the existing political order. This doubtless means the bourgeoisie should support it insofar as its struggle does not touch upon the interests of the bourgeoisie itself, i.e. insofar as it is only paving the bourgeoisie’s road to power. What would it mean for the proletariat to obtain the liberal bourgeoisie’s sympathy, as Plekhanov pleads, on those terms? Would it not mean giving up counterposing the proletariat’s political demands to the political platform of the bourgeoisie in the arena of political struggle, and counterposing proletarian methods of struggle against Tsarism to liberal methods? Would it not mean recommending that the proletariat wage the struggle against the existing political system within a framework that avoids touching on the interests of the bourgeoisie, i.e., to repeat, providing the bourgeoisie with the most beneficial possible result from the abolition of the old regime? This, unfortunately, is just what it would mean. This is the logical result of the spectre of the frightened liberal. And Plekhanov leaves no doubt about it.
In the most insistent manner, he recommends that we do not talk to the bourgeoisie on the eve of the bourgeois revolution in language that will only be appropriate after it (Dnevnik 4). What language will be appropriate then? The language of class struggle. But we already know that a struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat is taking place right now, under the flag of a struggle over political demands and of competition between political tactics, about the course of development that the Russian revolution will take—a struggle, as Plekhanov wrote in 1892, over whether the people will conquer political rights for themselves or political privileges for their exploiters. At a moment like that, is the language of class struggle appropriate?
It is essential; it is the foundation, including the foundation for the language of agreements that is not excluded from social-democratic practice in countries that have gone through the bourgeois revolution. Its absence would indicate that we actually had given up ‘counterposing’ the bourgeois understanding of ‘the fall of absolutism’ and the proletariat’s understanding of its immediate task. To put it briefly: it would mean replacing our immediate task with the immediate task of the bourgeoisie.
But the author of this tactic is relentless. Quoting the appeal ‘To All Owners of Commercial and Industrial Establishments’,[9] Plekhanov remarks: ‘this is the tone in which we need to speak to the bourgeoisie’. And Plekhanov is right—the concise, energetic call for a general strike (that of October) that he quotes contains no social-democratic ‘tactlessness’. But that is probably only because it does not contain a sniff of social democracy at all, or indeed of any specific political programme. The document does not mention the workers’ demands or even the name of the working class.
Plekhanov suggests we speak to the bourgeoisie in the tone of the Cadets.
And in defence of this ‘tone’ he immediately goes onto the attack, with an onslaught against the third party congress’s[10] resolution ‘On our attitude to the liberals’. This is not the place to defend the resolution; it is sufficient to note that Plekhanov is particularly unhappy with the clause that recommends ‘explaining to the workers the anti-revolutionary and anti-proletarian character of the bourgeois-democratic orientation in all its varieties’. The explanation would undoubtedly verge on ‘tactlessness’; it would inevitably imply a counterposition not only of ‘our ideology to the ideology of the bourgeoisie’, which is acceptable even to Plekhanov, but also of the revolutionary character of the proletarian struggle to the anti-revolutionary character of liberal political brokerage.
Plekhanov illustrates his conclusions by criticizing the strikes of November and December. He recommends selecting causes ‘for the proletariat’s conflict with the reaction that would secure the strikers the very broadest sympathy’. But the context makes clear that he is once again thinking of sympathy from the bourgeoise in the sense of the liberal opposition. And from this point of view it is understandable why Plekhanov criticizes the second and third strikes so sharply. These strikes formulated the demand not only for ‘the fall of absolutism’, but for ‘our immediate task’[11]—and therefore their content itself violated the first condition of the bourgeoisie’s sympathy. For the bourgeoisie only might support the proletariat insofar as it does not go beyond the bourgeois liberal understanding of ‘the immediate tasks’. What is more, the strikes passed over into an armed uprising, thus applying the method of political struggle that makes the bourgeoisie most anxious about the proletariat standing up too strongly (in Plekhanov’s words). It is obvious that the resulting ‘tone’ would hardly secure the bourgeoisie’s sympathy for the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat. Inde ira.[12] Hence the anger!
As for Plekhanov’s question about the conditions for ‘new and even more decisive defeats of Tsarism’, his conclusion is clear. The final response to the reaction must come when this response will have the sympathies of the whole of society on its side, i.e. the final response and the decisive defeat of Tsarism imply nothing other than a bourgeois-proletarian bloc to achieve by its united efforts the immediate tasks of... the bourgeoisie.
Plekhanov’s favourite formula about ‘isolating the reaction’, which for him has replaced the idea of ‘concentrating the revolutionary democracy around the proletariat’, signifies nothing other than the hegemony of the political platform of liberalism over the political platform and the tactics of the revolutionary democracy, led by the proletariat.
Thus, in trying to resolve the question that he himself posed in 1900 about realizing the proletariat’s hegemony in the concrete conditions of the Russian revolution—as the approach that would ensure the abolition of the old regime would take the most beneficial form for the proletariat,—Plekhanov has actually resolved a different task. His tactic, aimed at strengthening the proletariat’s position in the Russian bourgeois revolution, strengthens the positions of liberalism. His tactic makes resolving the bourgeoisie’s tasks easier. His tactic of attracting the sympathy of the bouegeoisie, based on downgrading the proletarian struggle to the bourgeois opposition’s level, both in tactical questions and in terms of its political programme, merely hands the leadership of this struggle to the liberals. Plekhanov himself warned us against this twenty years ago, and only the incorrectness of the path he has chosen can explain this strange error in logic on the part of Russian social democracy’s teacher and leader. Trying to resolve one task, he has actually resolved another. The utopianism of narrow paths has played a nasty joke on this clear intellect.
The entire course of Plekhanov’s thought leads to, and confirms, only one conclusion, which still remains the most valuable conquest of social-democratic thought on Russian soil. It is that hegemony will belong to the proletariat only to the extent of its growth in class consciousness, to the extent of the sharpness and class demarcation of its demands on the present regime, to the extent that the political conflict is intensified by its struggle to realize a workers’ political and socio-economic programme in the course of the Russian revolution. Any other path would reduce to a minimum the use that can be made of the bourgeois revolution in the interests of the socialist struggle of the proletariat.
And, in view of how Plekhanov has gone wrong, one wants to quote his own words uttered exactly fourteen years ago: ‘from our perspective it would be absurd to intentionally scare the liberals. But if they should happen to become afraid of us, independently of our will, then it remains only to regret their entirely “untimely” fearfulness. In any case, we consider the most harmful form of intimidation to be the intimidation of socialists with the spectre of a frightened liberal. The harm brought by this intimidation is incomparably greater than the benefit that could be brought by convincing the liberals of our moderation and orderliness’.[13]
Golden words!
Alongside G. V. Plekhanov’s position, another characteristic feature of the confusion that presently obtains within Russian social democracy is the appearance of the ‘revolutionary opposition tactic’. Recent times have brought a rather large quantity of fragmentary material representing this orientation, most of it in the form of resolutions. The chief literary materials, however, are Martynov’s old pamphlet Two Dictatorships, along with the same author’s Victories and Revanches and Dan’s pamphlet The State Duma (which goes some way to clarify the position). We shall therefore leave an examination of the ‘revolutionary opposition’ stance on one side for now, in the hope that the crystallization of this opinion will eventually lead to a finished literary work. The polemic around the State Duma, and on tactical platforms ahead of the upcoming fourth congress,[14] has provided sufficient impetus; and we eagerly await the definitive expression of this position, which works untiringly to ‘let the red flag be lowered to the tricolor’, as Marx puts it in The Class Struggles in France, referring to the insufficient development of the workers’ class consciousness at the moment of the French bourgeois revolution of 1848. ‘Side by side with the bourgeoisie’, in Marx’s words: such is this position, directly opposed to the idea of hegemony, but artfully concealed behind a clamour of Marxist and allegedly Marxist phraseology.
1. Socialism and the Poltical Struggle (Russian source)
2. On the Tasks of the Socialists in the Fight against Famine in Russia. English translation by Richard Mullin.
3. Dnevnik Sotsial-Demokrata, journal edited by Plekhanov. — Translator’s note.
4. When the Tsar’s government issued a manifesto promising political reform, an elected Duma, etc. — Translator’s note.
5. Plekhanov uses this pleasant name for those monarchists who proved their devotion to ‘the constitution’ by the pogroms of 18 October, the murder of Cde Bauman, etc.
6. If Plekhanov looked up the dates, he could convince himself that the majority of our trade unions date from precisely this period, and the role of social democrats in forming them was enormous. See, for instance, the report of the second conference of workers’ trade unions in Bez Zaglaviya, issue 13.
7. ‘People’s Freedom’, an underground Narodnik organization in 1879–84. — Translator’s note.
8. This refers to an armed uprising and the demand for a republic. Neither could be mentioned by name, due to the censorship. — Note to the 1923 edition.
9. Issued by the St Petersburg Soviet on 14 October 1905. — Translator’s note.
10. The third congress of the RSDLP met in London in April and May 1905. — Translator’s note.
11. The demand for a republic. — Note to the 1923 edition.
12. ‘Hence the anger’ (Latin), a quotation from the Satires of Juvenal. — Translator’s note.
13. On the Tasks of the Socialists in the Fight against Famine in Russia. English translation by Richard Mullin, slightly adjusted (as Kamenev adjusts the original) to fit into Kamenev’s sentence; the sense is not affected. Italics added by Kamenev. — Translator’s note.
14. Held in Stockholm in April and May 1906. — Translator’s note.
Last updated on 26 August 2026