Kautsky represents the Soviet workers, and the Russian working class
as a whole, as a conglomeration of egoists, loafers, and cowards.
He does not say one word about the conduct of the Russian bourgeoisie,
unprecedented in history for the magnitude of its scoundrelism;
about its national treachery; about the surrender of Riga to the
Germans, with "educational" aims; about the preparations for a
similar surrender of Petrograd; about its appeals to foreign
armies--Czecho-Slovakian, German, Roumanian, British, Japanese,
French, Arab and Negro--against the Russian workers and peasants;
about its conspiracies and assassinations, paid for by Entente money;
about its utilization of the blockade, not only to starve our children
to death, but systematically, tirelessly, persistently to spread over
the whole world an unheard-of web of lies and slander.
He does not say one word about the most disgraceful misrepresentations
of and violence to our party on the part of the government of the
S.R.s and Mensheviks before the November Revolution; about the
criminal persecution of several thousand responsible workers of the
party on the charge of espionage in favor of Hohenzollern Germany;
about the participation of the Mensheviks and S.R.s in all the plots
of the bourgeoisie; about their collaboration with the imperial
generals and admirals, Kolchak, Denikin and Yudenich; about the
terrorist acts carried out by the S.R.s at the order of the Entente;
about the risings organized by the S.R.s with the money of the foreign
missions in our army, which was pouring out its blood in the struggle
against the monarchical bands of imperialism.
Kautsky does not say one word about the fact that we not only repeated
more than once, but proved in reality our readiness to give peace to
the country, even at the cost of sacrifices and concessions, and that,
in spite of this, we were obliged to carry on an intensive struggle on
all fronts to defend the very existence of our country, and to prevent
its transformation into a colony of Anglo-French imperialism.
Kautsky does not say one word about the fact that in this heroic
struggle, in which we are defending the future of world Socialism, the
Russian proletariat is obliged to expend its principal energies, its
best and most valuable forces, taking them away from economic and
cultural reconstruction.
In all his book, Kautsky does not even mention the fact that first of
all German militarism, with the help of its Scheidemanns and the
apathy of its Kautskies, and then the militarism of the Entente
countries with the help of its Renaudels and the apathy of its
Longuets, surrounded us with an iron blockade; seized all our ports;
cut us off from the whole of the world; occupied, with the help of
hired White bands, enormous territories, rich in raw materials; and
separated us for a long period from the Baku oil, the Donetz coal, the
Don and Siberian corn, the Turkestan cotton.
Kautsky does not say one word about the fact that in these conditions,
unprecedented for their difficulty, the Russian working class for
nearly three years has been carrying on a heroic struggle against its
enemies on a front of 8,000 versts; that the Russian working class
learned how to exchange its hammer for the sword, and created a mighty
army; that for this army it mobilized its exhausted industry and, in
spite of the ruin of the country, which the executioners of the whole
world had condemned to blockade and civil war, for three years with
its own forces and resources it has been clothing, feeding, arming,
transporting an army of millions--an army which has learned how to
conquer.
About all these conditions Kautsky is silent, in a book devoted to
Russian Communism. And his silence is the fundamental, capital,
principal lie--true, a passive lie, but more criminal and more
repulsive than the active lie of all the scoundrels of the
international bourgeois Press taken together.
Slandering the policy of the Communist Party, Kautsky says nowhere
what he himself wants and what he proposes. The Bolsheviks were not
alone in the arena of the Russian Revolution. We saw and see in
it--now in power, now in opposition--S.R.s (not less than five groups
and tendencies), Mensheviks (not less than three tendencies),
Plekhanovists, Maximalists, Anarchists.... Absolutely all the "shades
of Socialism" (to speak in Kautsky's language) tried their hand, and
showed what they would and what they could. There are so many of these
"shades" that it is difficult now to pass the blade of a knife between
them. The very origin of these "shades" is not accidental: they
represent, so to speak, different degrees in the adaptation of the
pre-revolutionary Socialist parties and groups to the conditions of
the greater revolutionary epoch. It would seem that Kautsky had a
sufficiently complete political keyboard before him to be able to
strike the note which would give a true Marxian key to the Russian
Revolution. But Kautsky is silent. He repudiates the Bolshevik melody
that is unpleasant to his ear, but does not seek another. The solution
is simple: _the old musician refuses altogether to play on the
instrument of the revolution_.
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