like anarchism, is characteristic of all capitalist countries. The weakness of such revolutionism, its futility, its liability swiftly to transform itself into obedience, apathy, phantasy and even into a "mad" infatuation with some bourgeois "fashionable" tendency—all this is a matter of common knowledge. But a mere recognition in the abstract, a theoretical recognition of these truths, does not at all free revolutionary parties from old mistakes, which always appear unexpectedly in a somewhat new form, in new trappings, in more or less original surroundings.
Anarchism was often a kind of punishment for the opportunist sins of the working-class movement. Anarchism and opportunism were two deformities, one complementary to the other. It is partly due to Bolshevism that, notwithstanding the fact that the population of Russia, in comparison with European countries, is largely of a petit-bourgeois make-up, anarchism exercised a comparatively insignificant influence during the revolutions of 1905-1917; for Bolshevism has always carried on a merciless and uncompromising fight against opportunism. I say, it is partly due to Bolshevism, for a still greater part in weakening the influence of anarchism in Russia was played by the fact that it had the opportunity to flourish in full bloom in the seventies of the nineteenth century, and to reveal completely its uselessness as a guiding theory of the revolutionary class.
Bolshevism, at its inception in 1903, was imbued with the tradition of merciless struggle with petit-bourgeois, semi-anarchist and dilettante-anarchist revolutionism. This tradition always obtained in the revolutionary social democracy, and gained special strength in Russia in 1900-1903, when the foundations were being laid for a mass party of the revolutionary proletariat. Bolshevism continued the fight with the party which, more than any other, expressed tendencies of a petit-bourgeois revolutionism, namely, with the "Socialist-Revolutionaries." This fight was conducted on three main points. First, this party, rejecting Marxism, stubbornly refused to understand (it would be more correct to say that it could not understand) the necessity of a strictly objective estimate of all the class forces and their inter-relation in every political
