perfectly straight main street in Petrograd) N. G. Chernishevsky, the great Russian Socialist in the pre-Marxian period, used to say. The Russian revolutionaries, from the time of Chernishevsky, have paid with innumerable victims for ignoring or forgetting this truth. It is necessary by every means to prevent Left Communists and West European and American revolutionaries who are devoted to the working class from paying as dearly for the assimilation of this truth as did the backward Russians.
Before the downfall of Czarism, the Russian revolutionary Social Democrats made use repeatedly of the service of the bourgeois Liberals—i. e., concluded numerous practical compromises with them. In 1901–2, before the rise of Bolshevism, the old editorial staff of Iskra (comprising Plekhanoff, Axelrod, Zasulitch, Martoff, Potressoff, and myself) concluded a formal, although short-lived, political alliance with Struve, the political leader of bourgeois Liberalism, and succeeded at the same time in waging a most merciless ideological and political war against bourgeois Liberalism and against the slightest manifestation of its influence within the working class movement. The Bolsheviks always continued the same policy. From 1905 they systematically advocated a union of the working class and peasantry against the Liberal bourgeoisie and Czarism. At the same time they never refused to support the bourgeoisie against Czarism (for instance, during the second stage of the election, or in recounts), and never ceased the most irreconcilable ideological and political fight against the bourgeois revolutionary peasant party, the "Socialist Revolutionaries," exposing them as petit bourgeois democrats, falsely masquerading as Socialists.
In 1907 the Bolsheviks, for a short time, formed a formal political bloc in the Duma elections with the "Socialist Revolutionaries." Between 1903 and 1912 we were for several years formally united with the Mensheviks in one Social-Democratic party, never ceasing our ideological and political fight with them, as opportunists and transmitters of bourgeois influence to the proletariat. During the war we accepted some compromise with the "Kautskians," who were partly Left Mensheviks (Martoff) and partly "Socialist Revolutionaries"
