V. I.   Lenin

Mr. Plekhanov’s Futile Attempts to Extricate Himself


Published: Pravda No. 37, May 4 (April 21), 1917. Published according to the text in Pravda.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1964, Moscow, Volume 24, pages 199-200.
Translated: Isaacs Bernard
Transcription\Markup: B. Baggins and D. Walters
Public Domain: Lenin Internet Archive 1999 (2005). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.
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In No. 15 of Yedinstvo, Mr. Plekhanov, with an abundance of abuse unusual even for that abusive publication, attacks Pravda in an attempt to suppress two incontestably established facts.

You won’t succeed in hushing them up, gentlemen!

Fact number one. Mr. Plekhanov did not reprint our report, published in Izvestia of the Petrograd Soviet No. 32, for April 5, 1917, or the resolution of the Executive Committee.

This is not only an expression of anarchist disrespect for the elected representatives of the majority of the soldiers, but the dishonest method of a riot-monger.

Fact number two. Mr. Plekhanov’s hounding tactics has called forth a protest not from us, but from Dyelo Naroda, to which even such a colleague of Guchkov and Milyukov as Kerensky contributes. Dyelo Naroda for April 13, 1917, wrote of Mr. Plekhanov’s Yedinstvo in black and white:

We are accustomed to see such words and such a method of struggle in the columns of Russkaya Volya. But to see them employed in articles written by socialists is, frankly speaking, painful and depressing.”

This is the testimony of defencist witnesses, who politically are a thousand times closer to Mr. Plekhanov than to us.

What sort of readers does Mr. Plekhanov count on when he dismisses the testimony of a witness by saying that Dyelo Naroda has made an “inept remark”?

The witness has exposed Mr. Plekhanov’s riot-mongering methods.

There was a time when Mr. Plekhanov was a socialist. Now he has sunk to the level of Russkaya Volya.

No amount of abuse can do away with the fact that even Dyelo Naroda has exposed Mr. Plekhanov.

In an editorial reprinted in our issue for April 18 Izvestia of the Petrograd Soviet (No. 43, April 17) called this hounding campaign “dishonest and disgusting”.

This witness states bluntly that this dishonest and disgusting hounding campaign on the part of the dark forces and their newspapers was and is a fact. Mr. °Plekhanov, fallen to the Level of Russkaya Volya, stands hopelessly condemned.


Notes


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