p The protracted period of revisionism’s ascendancy in the international Marxist movement did not pass without a trace, of course. Marxists-Leninists still have to fight hard to cope with the relapses of those ideological and political diversions which had their roots in the past epoch. These diversions were already mentioned above. Here it should merely be stressed that the most damaging of them was the fact that revisionism had succeeded during its 79 domination to form cadres of a special kind. Indeed, revisionism is an infernal machine for corrupting cadres of proletarian revolutionaries, a forge for shaping a special type of leaders —unprincipled politicasters, opportunists and doubledealers.

p From the very first step towards creating a Marxist party in Russia, Lenin gave his attention to the formation of a leader of a new, proletarian type—an upright, straightforward, definite and truthful leader of the most lofty moral and ideological principles. In his early works, particularly in One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, Lenin exposes with biting sarcasm such ugly products of the “school” of revisionism as "anarchism of the ‘noble’ gentleman", " opportunist nihilism", "bourgeois individualism" and " pettybourgeois looseness". Even when our Party became the ruling Party, Lenin fought with tenfold energy against the slightest manifestation of creeping opportunism. Everyone knows how intolerant Lenin was of what was then called "communist conceit", and of such manifestations as arrogance, pomposity, conceit, self-assurance, self-delusion and complacency. To the end of his life he never ceased his efforts to prevent such a type of leader from ever reappearing within the ranks of the Bolshevik Party or penetrating into it from without. And our Party cherishes this behest of Lenin’s.

p I don’t think anyone has ever given a character study of an opportunist with such brilliant insight as Lenin. This is only natural, for no one knew the ways of the opportunists better than he did. In one of his articles he wrote:

p "When we speak of fighting opportunism, we must never forget a characteristic feature of present-day opportunism in every sphere, namely, its vagueness, amorphousness, elusiveness. An opportunist, by his very nature, will always evade taking a clear and decisive stand, he will always seek a middle course, he will always wriggle like a snake between two mutually exclusive points of view and try to ‘agree’ with both and reduce his differences of opinion to petty amendments, doubts, innocent and pious suggestions, and so on and so forth.”  [79•* 

p What words of gold, what microscopic accuracy in grasping and generalising the type of opportunist. There it is, the 80 physiognomy of that special kind of leader raised on the leaven of revisionism, fighting shy of clarity and definiteness, escaping from life’s difficult moments, shrinking from centralism, discipline and organisation, attempting to cloak, slur over, tone down the real factors of social development. Indeed, the opportunist is an elusive, slippery, faceless figure, whose thinking and actions are governed by fear at the idea of any critical interpretation of life’s contradictions and who tries to lull the masses with specious arguments and leave them ideologically defenceless in the struggle against their class enemies.

p A common feature of revisionists, as Lenin pointed out, is that they disguise themselves as Marxists, while actually fighting Marxism. Their tactic was "... not to oppose the principles of Marxism openly, but to pretend to accept Marxism, while emasculating it by sophistry and turning it into a holy ‘icon’ that is harmless to the bourgeoisie”.  [80•*  "In deed—a complete renunciation of dialectical materialism, i.e., of Marxism; in word—endless subterfuges, attempts to evade the essence of the question, to cover their retreat. . . .”  [80•**  "An ever subtler falsification of Marxism, an ever subtler presentation of anti-materialist doctrines under the guise of Marxism—this is the characteristic feature of modern revisionism. . . .”  [80•***  One is entitled to ask, what forcing-beds do leaders of such a type come from? To put it bluntly, they come and will continue to come from those bourgeois and petty-bourgeois depths which nourish and breed revisionists of every stripe and colour. And so long as that soil exists the shoots of opportunism will continue to sprout. These types are alive and flourishing to this day. This type of leader traces its parentage to Eduard Bernstein, who said of himself that "synthetic thinking and deduction did not come easy to me”.  [80•****  And Parvus (Helphand) said of him: " Bernstein has a knack of uniting the most heterogeneous ( unconnected) things while at the same time disconnecting and separating the most simple.”  [80•*****  No wonder that the entire activities of this father of opportunism consist of 81 backslidings. Describing his own activities, Bernstein wrote that they were divided into three stages. The first stage, when he, Bernstein, was an orthodox Marxist and applied all his energies to the propaganda of this great doctrine. The second stage was devoted to renouncing orthodox Marxism, when he applied all his energies and resources to discrediting and disproving that great scientific doctrine. The third stage was devoted to explaining why and how he had made this kind of fly over from Marxism into the camp of the bourgeoisie. Towards the end of his life this theoretician admitted that the last two stages had been very difficult for him,  [81•*  which was only natural, since he had to explain such a comedown,

p A favourite trick of revisionists is to falsify, distort and juggle with the facts, a thing which they do on the specious pretext of “improving” and “clarifying” them. And when caught out in plain lying, calumny and insinuations they promptly assume the attitude of an injured, insulted and misunderstood party, fall into hysterics, beat their breasts and protest their “honesty” and “impeccability”. To this day Marxists-Leninists often have to deal with such trickery on the part of revisionists. Obviously, these are not random incidents breaking through at crucial moments of political life. They are a definite system of behaviour, a way of thinking, on the part of this special type of leaders trained in the revisionist school for execution of the bourgeoisie’s order. Let us turn to the historical facts.

p The orthodox school of revisionist cadres within the Marxist movement had formed gradually during the lifetime of the founders of scientific communism. It fell to Engels’s lot to set eyes on the first perfidious tricks of the revisionists. While seriously ill, he wrote his famous “Introduction” to Marx’s The Class Struggles in France. It was his swan song. And what happened? In the treacherous hands of Bernstein this article was so corrected and revised that Engels could not recognise it. By expurgating from it all the revolutionary passages Bernstein the revisionist turned it into that document of pacific socialism which has since been quoted a countless number of times and had come to be regarded as the confession of a once revolutionary Marxist.

p On reading this vile forgery, Engels, stricken with mortal 82 illness, at once wrote a letter to Kautsky (April 1, 1895) and a similar one to Lafargue (April 3, 1895). He wrote: "To my astonishment I see in the Vorwarts today an extract from my “Introduction”, printed without my prior knowledge and trimmed in such a fashion that I appear as peaceful worshipper of legality at any price. So much the more would I like the whole thing to appear now in the Neue Zeit so that this disgraceful impression will be wiped out.”  [82•*  Engels’s protest against this scurvy trick had no effect, however. He was to see the text of his “Introduction” published in Neue Zeit in the same garbled form. Protests were unavailing. On August 5, 1895, Engels was no more, and the revisionists went through the routine of mourning the departure of their most, implacable and unbending antagonist. The world did not learn the true meaning of Engels’s “Introduction” until 1925, when the K. Marx and F. Engels Institute under the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U. published the full text of it.

p It is significant, by the way, that when the Bolsheviks published the authentic documents of Engels, who sharply criticised revisionism, which had penetrated into the Marxist movement, Bernstein himself was forced to confess his fraudulent sins. "After the publication of these letters," Bernstein wrote in 1925, "it is no longer possible to withhold publication of them in the language in which Engels wrote them.”  [82•**  Here you have a classical example of hypocrisy, unscrupulousness, and double-dealing by a so-called orthodox Marxist. And are not the present-day revisionists resorting to similar methods?!

p Having gained possession of the vast fund of Marx’s and Engels’s manuscripts, the revisionist leaders literally issued them by driblets. Lenin and his associates had to exert no little efforts in order to introduce to future generations this rich heritage of the great founders of scientific communism. For example, their letters to Sorge were not published until 1906, to Kugelmann and Weydemeyer, until 1907, to Becker until 1920, to Viktor Adler and to Bernstein until 1924. As our readers now know, these letters give very important advice on tactics of the struggle both against the Right and the “Left” revisionist trends. Today, thanks to the gigantic 83 efforts of the C.P.S.U., we have a complete edition of the works of the classics of Marxism-Leninism.

p Another line of the revisionist school is smear techniques, methods of moral terror, blackmail and intrigue. Look at the facts. No sooner did revisionism start cutting its teeth within the Marxist movement than new aspects began to appear in the very character of the intra-party struggle. The first sounds of these new strings were caught by Wilhelm Liebknecht, who decided to call Bernstein’s revisionist bluff and named him "the great lickspittle of capitalism". It looked an internal party affair. But quite unexpectedly, without warning, a storm of invective broke over the head of Liebknecht throughout the bourgeois press, which accused him of being a henchman of Marx and Engels and nothing less than a secret agent for engineering an armed putsch among the German working class. This version, emanating from confidential Social-Democratic sources, gave sufficient grounds for hounding the proletarian leader and hastening his death.

p The revisionist leaders employed a still viler method towards the acknowledged leader of the German proletariat August Bebel. As you know, a whole epoch in the international labour movement is associated with this outstanding figure. Himself a proletarian, a son of toil, privation and hardships, he, by sheer talent and mastery of Marxism, rose to the pedestal of a professional revolutionary, a proletarian leader. And when the revisionists attempted to revise the principles of the party Bebel exclaimed: "Such a tactic would be for the party the same as if a living organism had had its backbone broken and was still expected to be as viable as before.”  [83•* 

p Naturally, the revisionists could not forgive him this impertinence. Over a period of many years they schemed to bring about his downfall, slandered him in the press, and helped to swing the vote against him at the Reichstag elections. They even played such a shabby trick as to spread a rumour about his death in the world press. This is what Bebel himself wrote on this score: "The report about my death was sent also to the United States and made our New York comrades arrange a funeral meeting in my honour, which was attended by several thousand people with 84 Vahlteich delivering a speech. I found the thing highly amusing, but when Vahlteich learned that it was all a misunderstanding he got very angry and reproached me with not having reported that I was alive and well. I answered, how was I to know that they had received such information and believed it!"  [84•* 

p Similar methods of baiting were employed against other staunch supporters of Marxism. Rosa Luxemburg, for example, was ostracised and for a long time was not admitted to any international party forums. Franz Mehring was harassed in the most disgraceful manner. The thing was so disgusting that Mehring was obliged to publicly denounce his slanderers. Speaking at the Dresden congress, he said that the slanderous attacks against him were one of those "attacks which had heretofore been the unenviable privilege of bourgeois literary circles, one of those attacks, for which weeks and months are spent in reliable ambush sharpening a dagger with which to kill an unarmed man”.  [84•**  If we compare these facts with the actions the revisionists are employing in present-day conditions it becomes clear that these leaders are but birds of one feather. Both past and present revisionists are anything but scrupulous in their behaviour. Although the revisionist theoreticians have a lot to say about humanism, democracy and liberty, they act in a most dictatorial, tyrannical and treacherous manner.

p In this connection it would be well to remember the grim and arduous fight with revisionism of both shades, Right and “Left”, which fell to the lot of the monolithic Leninist core of the Bolshevik Party. In this context we are interested only in one aspect of the question—the character of the revisionist-opportunist. Our historical literature has dealt in detail with Trotsky’s Menshevism and shilly-shallyings, with 85 Zinoviev’s and Kamenev’s perfidy on the eve of the October armed uprising in 1917, when these blacklegs came out in the open press against the Party’s line, thus disclosing the Central Committee’s decision in favour of the uprising. The Party forgave them this base treachery, but what happened afterwards?

p Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev are known to have often had scraps among themselves, but at crucial moments for the Party they teamed up to attack Lenin and his Party. Coming together or moving apart, the Trotskyists invariably kept their feeling of fellowship. Let us take a closer look at their backstage performances. For example, in the early twenties, in connection with Lenin’s grave illness, Zinoviev and Kamenev suddenly fell foul of Trotsky and reminded him more and more often of his Menshevik “sins”. Trotsky, in turn, gave as good as he got. He, too, kept reminding them of their dirty blacklegging. He reminded them also of Kamenev’s despicable telegram from his place of exile greeting the Provisional Government and Mikhail Romanov. What is more, Trotsky demanded of the Politbureau of the C.C. that Zinoviev be removed from all key posts for his cowardice and inaction during Yudenich’s advance upon Petrograd. The C.C. rejected these proposals.

p But three years after these "family jars" find Zinoviev and Kamenev tabling a proposal in the Politbureau of the C.C. C.P.S.U. to have Trotsky removed from all key posts and from membership of the Politbureau and expelled from the Party for his disruptive work and publication of his falsifying book Lessons of October, put out in 1924 immediately after Lenin’s death. These proposals were examined at the Politbureau and rejected. One may ask, why? Because “lovers’ tiffs are harmless". In both cases a treacherous aim stands clearly revealed—that of disrupting the unity of the Party’s leading core and starting a big fight to wreck the Party itself. This treacherous aim became evident within a year, when Zinoviev and Kamenev, speaking at the 14th Congress of the Party in the capacity of leaders of the New Opposition, ranged themselves wholly on the side of Trotskyism and banded together against Leninism, against the Central Committee of the Party.

p To begin with the Trotskyists brought all their fire down upon Bukharin, whom they accused of the grievous sins of Right Social-Democracy. They demanded that he be 86 relieved of all key posts and expelled from membership of the Politbureau and the Party. We all know the reaction to this of the Party congress, which stood up for Bukharin and rejected the motion of the Trotskyists. It seemed as if the fight against Trotskyism, the fight against such hoary politicians as Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev, had ended in the victory of the Leninist core. But suddenly a new and most surprising situation arose. The Party learned that Bukharin in 1929 had entered into secret negotiations with Kamenev with the object of setting up a new anti-Leninist bloc uniting all the formerly defeated factions and groups. And when the Politbureau put it to him seriously he admitted it and qualified his behaviour as “thoughtlessness”.

p Of course, this behaviour on Bukharin’s part was no accident. It is not surprising therefore that in the course of his entire political career he constantly lurched from side to side, now an extreme “Leftist”, as happened during the Brest peace talks, now a middle-of-the-road man during the trade union controversy, now an extreme Rightist during the period of full-scale socialist construction. His fall, to use the words of Lenin, was due to the fact that he did not understand Marxist dialectics. He was a doctrinaire, a scholastic theorist who knew the Marxist formulas but was never able to creatively apply them to the living concrete reality.

p The load of his fallacious theoretical concepts made itself felt at all the turning-points in our Party’s history. At the Sixth Congress Bukharin opposed Lenin’s line at armed uprising, giving as his reasons the fact that the peasantry was not ready to support the proletariat in this business. The first year after the victorious October Revolution he came out against Lenin’s principles of economic construction, declaring that the chief menace was state capitalism, and not the welter of petty-bourgeois anarchistic elements. During the subsequent stages of economic construction Bukharin continued to hold extremely precarious positions. As a result Bukharin showed himself in his views and actions to be a petty-bourgeois revolutionary rather than a Marxist- Leninist, a man who had failed to grasp the full import of the objective processes of socio-economic development and the laws of the class struggle.

p One must be more than naive to believe, in the face of all these ineluctable facts, in the political good faith of the 87 Trotskyists and Bukharinites—those experienced, boneheaded politicians—in the years to come. True, at the 17th Congress of the Party they all renounced their erroneous platforms and conceptions and swore to march in step with the Party. But this was a technique they had often used before. No wonder, therefore, that world reaction in the struggle against socialism had always counted on these • leaders. Many publications have appeared in the world today whose authors testify to the fact that in the mid-thirties there existed in the U.S.S.R. illegal organisations uniting politically and ideologically demoralised elements from Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries to Trotskyists, Zinovievites and Bukharinites.

p We shall not go into the details of Trotsky’s boastful and provocative statements, one of which, on the eve of the Second World War, was the assertion that "the Fourth International possesses already today its strongest, most numerous and most hardened branch in the U.S.S.R.”  [87•* 

p We have no intention of delving into the measure of guilt of this or that member of the opposition. We merely wish to remind people once again of the despicable methods which all these politicasters employ. To put it bluntly, both the Trotskyists and Bukharinites terrorised the staunch Leninist cadres and shook the Party to its foundations. Intrigues, blackmail, calumny, threats, scurillous jokes—these formed the armamentarium of the revisionist ideologues’ mean methods. All this was unleashed first and foremost against the tried and trusted, courageous and illustrious leaders of the revolution beloved by the people.

p We have been shown in the foregoing a character study of opportunists of past epochs. And how many of them are still debauching the minds of revolutionary workers and of all progressive members of society! One cannot pass over in silence the figure of Djilas of grievous memory. The writer of these lines had occasion in 1946 to hear him, when during his stay in Moscow, he expressed the desire to deliver a lecture at the Party Higher School under the C.C. of the C.P.S.U.(B.) on the subject of "The All-Conquering Power of Marxism-Leninism". At that time he spoke from correct communist positions about the liberation struggle in Yugoslavia and among other nations of Europe, about the 88 courageous struggle of the Communists who were leading the peoples’ fight against fascism, and spoke a lot and with special warmth about the Soviet Union, the first land of socialism.

p At that time Djilas laid special stress on the fact that the Yugoslav Communists, guided by the experience of the C.P.S.U.(B.) and the revolutionary theory of MarxismLeninism, would deal quickly and ably with the problems of industrialisation, collectivisation, and the cultural revolution, would establish proper national relations and with the help of the U.S.S.R. would build socialism more successfully in a short space of time. Thus spoke the Communist Djilas at the time. Today the renegade Djilas viciously slanders the Soviet Union, the Communist Party and our great feat of arms, and talks himself into monstrous treachery and imperialist toadyism when he urges the capitalist world to join forces and crush the Soviet Union, force it to its knees before predatory imperialism.

p Nor can one forget Roger Garaudy, now wielding a facile pen. He, too, never misses a chance to make the most of his veteranship in the communist movement. He really did write well once upon a time. Take the newspaper Pravda for April 5, 1958, containing his article headed "In the Fight Against Revisionism". This is what he wrote then: "The fight against revisionism is one of the most important tasks of the world communist movement. Revisionism is an attempt to deny or at least to play down the class struggle and the leading role of the working class and its party, which ultimately leads to the revisionists taking a closer stand with the liberal bourgeoisie, which is out to cultivate the illusion of the possible existence of ‘neocapitalism’.. . . The problem of working-class unity and cohesion of the democratic forces is treated by the revisionists in a manner that would lead the Communist Party to renounce Marxist-Leninist principles in their organisational forms.”

p Garaudy goes on to heap devastating criticism on the revisionists of all stripes who aligned with the bourgeois ideologues. He writes: "The bourgeois ideologists never tire of talking about ’Marxism’s obsolescence’." We must take into consideration the changes that have occurred since Marx, the Social-Democrats declare in the columns of the journal La Revue Socialiste. The Catholics write the same thing in the journal Esprit, and so do the idealist philosophers of the 89 so-called existentialist trend in the journal Les Temps Modernes. Marxism is scientific socialism of a past age, writes Lucien Laurat. He is echoed by Jean Marie Domenach, who declares that it is not a question of the destitution of the proletariat in 1850 but of the condition of the French workers in 1957.

p Garaudy makes hay of all these pernicious arguments. He passionately upholds the Declaration of the Meeting of Communist and Workers’ Parties of 1957. Today we find him repudiating the idea of communist commitment, writing for the bourgeois press on open anti-communist ground, villifying his own Party and the Soviet Union, and repudiating the fundamental tenets of Marxism-Leninism. There they are, the rotten fruits of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois thought-patterns, the fruits of that corrupt ideological milieu in which not only things, but a man’s conscience, his heart and mind, can be bought and sold. To put it mildly, the “Marxist” Garaudy has become a victim of these mores.

p In his two recent hastily-cooked books Le grand tournant du socialisme and Toute la verite Garaudy stands revealed in his true renegade’s colours. On the one hand, he spews out a torrent of venomous calumny, filth and insinuations. On the other, he falls over backwards, to flatter and swear allegiance to Marxism. Garaudy uses the same technique which the Russian revisionist group, known as God-Seekers and God-Builders, who had wormed their way into the R.S.D.L.P. once employed. They covered up their renegadism by saying: "Maybe we are mistaken, but we are seeking." To this Lenin replied: "It is not you who are seeking, but you who are being soughtl You do not go with your, i.e., Marxist (for you want to be Marxists), standpoint to every change in the bourgeois philosophical fashion; the fashion comes to you, foists upon you its new falsifications adapted to the idealist taste. . . .”  [89•*  This appraisal of Lenin’s fully applies to Garaudy and his ilk.

p Today’s revisionists can be said to have lost all honour and dignity in their puerile criticism. They are outdoing in servility their revisionist forebears. In their slander of Marxism-Leninism, these falsifiers have shifted their attacks against the doctrinal and political positions of the modern 90 international communist movement. Their activities are aimed directly at splitting and eventually breaking up the parties. Their favourite demagogic method is to slap on labels with the object of compromising honest and staunch Communists. Here the palm goes to the revisionists, who were really the first to start dividing Communists into orthodox and unorthodox, hardliners and progressists, Stalinists and anti-Stalinists. They have now given currency to new terms—neo-Stalinists and super-Stalinists.

p All this is immediately pounced on and puffed up by imperialist propaganda, which in its turn tosses to the revisionists some “new” ideas to work on. The numerous facts of the ideological struggle clearly show how subtle and well-thought-out is the work of imperialist propaganda and its agents aimed at corrupting the masses, discrediting Marxism-Leninism, and "softening up" socialism and the Communist Parties. In these wrecking activities the bourgeoisie count first and foremost on the revisionist cadres which have penetrated into the Marxist-Leninist movement.

And so the orthodox school of revisionism has created a special type of leader. The opportunist is a product of the impact on the labour movement of the ideology of the bourgeoisie. Fearing the appeal of Marxist-Leninist ideas, the bourgeoisie, besides using undisguised violence, is resorting more and more widely and frequently to insidious methods of corrupting the democratic and socialist movement from within. The revisionists on the Right and revisionists on the “Left” are twin brothers, "blood relations". They would seem to be going different ways, but they arrive at a single goal from different sides, share the same platform of virtual defenders of bourgeois ideals. Finding themselves in the same ranks, however, they promptly steer clear of one another amidst abusive attacks, diverging only to prepare the ground again for converging. As a matter of fact, as Lenin said, "all belong to the same family, all extol each other, learn from each other, and together take up arms against ’dogmatic Marxism".  [90•*  For such is the opportunist nature of these anti-proletarian politicians. To get a better and deeper understanding of their social essence it is worthwhile turning again to the lessons of history.