A short time ago, one of the two factions into which our sister party in Russia has regrettably been divided for approximately the past two years held a congress under the name “Third Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party.”† The other faction, grouped around Axelrod, Plekhanov, and Zasulich, whose public organ is the well-known Iskra, did not take part in this quasi-universal congress, on the grounds that, as it explains, this “Congress” did not allow the participation of all the active local committees of the RSDRP—though such participation would obviously have to be expected of any truly unified party congress. Hence, that faction strictly adhered to the letter of the party rules, about which such a furor in the party had flared up. However, a large portion of the party organizations now did not want to abide by those rules, and this excluded the latter faction [the Mensheviks] from active collaboration in the party congress.‡
This faction has now held its own conference, after failed attempts to come to an understanding and arrange for some sort of mutual consultation with the initiators and participants in the [Bolshevik] factional “Congress,” and at this [Menshevik] conference they too have made decisions and passed resolutions about questions of tactics and organization.§
We now are confronted with the fact that the Russian party, as before, is divided into two camps, although it goes without saying that they belong together, because both base themselves on the same program and, by and large, on the same tactics. And, however we might deplore this fact, and in addition feel such a deep grievance about it, it is necessary, in any case, to take this split into account as a fact of life. At the very least, this deplorable conflict, which saddens us deeply, is made even worse by the way one of the two factions presents itself everywhere as the only official representative of Russian Social Democracy and tries to dismiss the other faction as merely a tiny group of incorrigible squabblers.
The “congress” faction (the so-called Lenin faction) is particularly guilty of behaving in this manner, because it has published its decisions and resolutions in German and presented them to the German public as the results of the Third Congress of the RSDRP. And, by the way, how our party publishing house in Munich came to place itself in the service of one of the competing factions is totally unclear to us—yet that probably is based on not being oriented accurately with regard to the situation in the Russian camp. However that may be, one of the two groups in our sister party, the RSDRP, has chosen a way to see what it can do in the given situation by making a most unintelligent move—namely, to force its rival out of the way, so to speak, and thus win recognition in the International.* It is certainly clear to everyone that this somewhat “Cossack” way of resolving a party dispute through its behavior and way of perceiving things about the faction in question (which unfortunately has made itself known a bit too widely) is not suitable for improving relations in the Russian party. On the contrary, it only further stirs up the fire. It was therefore, in our opinion, a wise word, worthy of recognition, that [Karl] Kautsky recently warned the party press in the Leipziger Volkszeitung, on the basis of his knowledge of persons and developments in the Russian party, that our press could complicate the situation without meaning to and make matters worse in the ranks of our Russian comrades by accepting and unwittingly reporting in a distorted way the supposedly “official” decisions of the Russian factional congress.†
Now a peculiar quid pro quo has occurred. In the Frankfurter Volksstimme [People’s Voice of Frankfurt] of June 17, [1905], a certain comrade “Gr.”‡ has come forward to acquaint the German comrades with the decisions of the supposedly “universal” Russian congress. In his article, he indignantly rejects Kautsky’s suggestions, arguing that it is not at all a question of two factions, but that on one side there is the [Russian] party as a whole and on the other there are merely three misfits—Plekhanov, Axelrod, and Martov—who are making a fuss. All this is demonstrated irrefutably by “Gr.”—basing himself on a report by one faction that simply denies the existence of the other faction. But that is exactly where the problem lies!
For Kautsky, it was precisely a matter of warning the German comrades in advance not to take a factional presentation of the situation for good coin, not to accept it unreservedly. Certainly, Kautsky did not mean to say—and it does not occur to us to make such an assertion—that the statements in the booklet published by [Gerhard] Birk in Munich were some sort of intentional or conscious distortions of the facts.* We are not about to get into a detailed evaluation of the dispute. But it is a well-known psychological phenomenon in every major party conflict that each one of the disputing sides sees and presents matters in its own subjective light—being honestly convinced inwardly that it is correct to the best of its knowledge—and, at the same time, is capable of laying on the table the greatest possible objective distortions. It is not a matter, then, of merely rejecting or “banning” the conception of one faction or its manner of presentation, but of not promoting, or giving precedence to, either of them by giving a one-sided presentation of the actual relationship of forces, and thus stirring up greater bitterness.
Whoever wishes to reconcile two disputants obviously cannot begin by declaring, before all else, that one of the two does not even exist. However, to help the two Russian factions achieve reconciliation is undoubtedly a worthy objective, toward which the German party should lend a hand as strongly as it can.
In the Frankfurter Volksstimme, the comrade named “Gr.” also polemicizes against Kautsky precisely on this point,† because he considers any eventual mediation by the German party to be totally superfluous, but perhaps he will be pleasantly surprised to learn that leading comrades of the Russian faction that he takes to be the only real one—that even they themselves do not at all consider such eventual mediation superfluous, and this is the case even after their congress.