that in several places the workers, because of our lack of stamina and ability to maintain secrecy, began to lose faith in the intelligentsia and to avoid them: The intellectuals, they said, are much too careless and lay them.selves open to police raids!
Any one who has the slightest knowledge of the movement knows that these primitive methods at last began to be recognised as a disease by all thinking Social-Democrats. And in order that the reader, who is not acquainted with the movement, :may have no grounds for thinking that we are "inventing" a special stage or special disease of the :movement, we shall refer once again to the witness we have already quoted. No doubt we shall he excused for the length of the passage quoted:
While the gradual transition to wider practical activity [writes B-v in Rabocheye Dyelo, No. 6], a transition which is closely connected with the general transitional period through which the Russian labour movement is now passing, is a characteristic feature … there is, however, another and not less interesting feature in the general mechanism of the Russian workers' revolution. We refer to the general lack of revolutionary forces fit for action[1] which is felt not only in St. Petersburg, but throughout the whole of Russia. With the general revival of the labour movement, with the general development of the working masses, with the growing frequency of strikes, and with the mass labour struggle becoming more and more open, the intensification of government persecution, arrests, deportation and exile, this lack of highly skilled revolutionary forces is becoming more and more marked and, without a doubt, must leave deep· traces upon the general character of the movement. Many strikes take place without the revolutionary organisations exercising any strong and direct influence upon them. … A shortage of agitational leaflets and illegal literature is felt. … The workers' circles are left without agitators. … Simultaneously, there is a constant shortage of funds. In a word, the growth of the labour movement is outstripping the growth and development of the revolutionary organisations. The numerical strength of the active revolutionists is too small to enable them to concentrate in themselves all the influence exercised upon the whole of the discontented masses of labour, or to give this unrest even a shadow of symmetry and organisation. … Separate circles, separate revolutionists, scattered, uncombined do not represent a united, strong and disciplined organisation with the planned development of its parts. …
Admitting that the immediate organisation of fresh circles to take the place of those that have been broken up, "merely proves the virility of the movement … but does not prove the existence of an adequate number of sufficiently fit revolutionary workers," the author concludes:
- ↑ All italics ours.
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