Published:
Vperyod, No. 8, February 28 (15), 1905.
Published according to the text in Vperyod.
Source:
Lenin
Collected Works,
Foreign Languages Publishing House,
1962,
Moscow,
Volume 8,
page 181.
Translated: Bernard Isaacs and The Late Isidor Lasker
Transcription\Markup:
R. Cymbala
Public Domain:
Lenin Internet Archive
(2003).
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.
• README
In the leading article of Iskra, No. 87, Plekhanov, deferring suavely to Martov, successfully applies, the tactics of killing with kindness[1] . Though playing up to the author of the leading article in issue No. 85, Plekhanov, in substance, wholly refutes him and subscribes to the very views which Vperyod has always maintained. Congratulations! Only bear in mind your kinship with Martynov, most honourable dialectician. Get him to tell you about the awful and disastrous fate that lies in store for you, if, upon having “prepared the victory” (slogan in issue No. 87), you achieved it! Get him to tell you of the grave danger involved in “the seizure of power”, in “participation in the provisional government”, and in “the revolutionary dictatorship”. Poor Plekhanov, it will take him a long time to extricate himself from the mess in which the pamphlets of Trotsky, Martynov, “A Worker”, and Axelrod, approved by the entire (?) Editorial Board have entangled him! In the supplement to Iskra, No. 86, Popov admits to being the author of the letter published in Lenin’s “Statement”. Which but needed proof! The systematic deception of the Party by the gentlemen of the Minority has been proved. As we predicted, these gentlemen are trying to get out of it by drawing a red herring across the reader’s track in the form of the question whether Lenin had the right to confiscate a letter that exposed the Bonapartists. Martov and Popov, so distinguished for their moral sensitivity, are yelling about theft, spying, and so on. Scold away, gentlemen, to your hearts’ content. Lacking arguments, what else is left for you to do?
[1] The words “kill with kindness” are in English in the original.—Ed.
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