and at the same time the last act of the Social-Democrats in this period.
The third period, as we have seen, began in 1897 and definitely replaced the second period in 1898 (1898–?). This was the period of confusion, disintegration, and vacillation. In the period of adolescence the youth's voice breaks. The voice of Russian Social-Democracy in this period began to break, began to strike a false note—on the one hand, in the productions of Messrs. Struve and Prokopovich, Bulgakov and Berdyaev, on the other hand in the productions of V. I-na and R. M., B. Krichevsky and Martynov. But it was only the leaders who wandered from the path; the movement itself continued to grow and advanced by enormous strides. The proletarian struggle spread to new strata of the workers over the whole of Russia and at the same time indirectly stimulated the revival of the democratic spirit among the students and among other strata of the population. The consciousness of the leaders, however, shrank be£ore the breadth and power of the spontaneous rising; among Social-Democrats, a different streak predominated—a streak of party workers who had been trained almost exclusively on "legal" Marxian literature, and the more the spontaneity of the masses called for consciousness, the more they lacked consciousness. The leaders not only lagged behind in regard to theory ("freedom of criticism") and practice ("primitiveness") but even tried to justify their backwardness by all sorts of high-flown arguments. Social-Democracy was degraded to the level of trade unionism in legal literature by the Brentanoists and in illegal literature by the Khvostists. The programme of the Credo began to be put into operation, especially when the "primitiveness" of the Social-Democrats caused a revival of non-Social-Democratic revolutionary tendencies.
And if the reader reproaches me for having dealt in excessive detail with Rabocheye Dyelo, I will say to him in reply: Rabocheye Dyelo acquired "historical" significance because it most strikingly reflected the "spirit" of this third period.[1] It was not the consistent R. M. but the weathercock Krichevskys and Martynovs who could properly express the confusion and vacillation, and the readiness to
- ↑ I could also reply in the German proverb: Den Sack schägt man, den Esel meint man. It was not Rabocheye Dyelo alone that was carried away by the fashion of "criticism" but also the masses of practical workers and theoreticians; they became confused over the question of spontaneity and slipped from the Social-Democratic to the trade-union conception of our political and organisational tasks.
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