tain burning questions of the day, questions of international Communist tactics. Russian experience has given us one successful and correct application of the boycott (1905), and one incorrect application of it, by the Bolsheviks. In the first case we see that we succeeded in preventing the convocation of a reactionary parliament by a reactionary government, under conditions in which revolutionary mass action (strikes in particular) outside parliament was growing with exceptional rapidity. At that time not a single element of the proletariat or the peasantry gave any support to the reactionary government; the proletariat secured for itself influence over the backward masses by means of strike and agrarian movements. It is quite evident that this experience is not applicable to present-day European conditions. It is also quite evident, on the strength of the foregoing arguments, that even a conditional defense of the refusal to participate in parliament, on the part of the Dutch and the “Left,” is thoroughly wrong and harmful to the cause of the revolutionary proletariat.
In Western Europe and America, parliament has become an object of special aversion to the advanced revolutionaries of the working class. This is self-evident, and is quite comprehensible, for it is difficult to imagine anything more abominable, base, and treacherous than the behavior of the overwhelming majority of Socialist and Social-Democratic deputies in Parliament, during and after the period of the war. But it would be, not only unreasonable, but obviously criminal to yield to such a frame of mind when solving the question of how to struggle against this generally admitted evil. In many countries of Western Europe the revolutionary mood is, we might say, a “novelty,” a “rarity,” which has been too long expected, vainly and impatiently it may be; and it may be because of this that people more easily yield to their frame of mind. Of course, without a revolutionary disposition on the part of the masses, and without conditions tending to enhance this disposition, revolutionary tactics will never materialize in action. But we in Russia have convinced ourselves, by long, painful, and bloody experience, of the truth that it is impossible to build up revolutionary tactics solely on revolutionary dispositions and moods.
