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party officialdom and intellectuals is undoubtedly on the side of the Rights. We witnessed just the same in our party in the days before the Mensheviks gladdened us by their departure…
A few words on the principal leaders of the Right Wing at the congress will explain much.
As far as theory and ideas are concerned the principal leader of the Right Wing is undoubtedly Rudolf Hilferding. His features remind us of a "respectable" stockbroker or a well-to-do banker. He is persona gratæ with representatives of the British diplomatic mission in Berlin, with the fashionable political salons of ladies of rank, and sometimes he appears at the meetings of trade union officials and at congresses. He is no believer in revolution; it is well he believes in realities. But then he does not believe in anything. You can see it in his face, nay, in the very folds of his coat. He is a thorough sceptic; he is convinced that the high tide of revolution is over, and that at the present time Germany and the whole of Europe is passing through the last convulsions of the revolutionary upheaval. All that has passed he regards—as did our kadets and Mensheviks some time ago—as "the raging of the elements." A conversation of his with an English diplomat, an intrigue with some "Left" Scheidemannist are of far greater importance in his eyes, as a "factor" of progress than a movement of hundreds of thousands of unemployed in Germany, or the growing unrest of the Eastern nations. Herr Hilferding, from the heights of his smug "scholastic" greatness, arrogantly mocks at everybody whose political wisdom is inferior to his own. At the party conference of the Independents, which took place at Berlin some three weeks ago, this scholar spoke with inimitable stupidity of "Mullahs from Khiva" (not so well versed in Marx as he, Herr Hilferding), whom the demagogues, the Bolsheviks, were trying to draw into the Communist International. Under "Mullahs from Khiva," the learned Herr Hilferding understands the Baku congress of the nations of the East, and generally speaking the movement of oppressed nationalities. This movement Herr Hilferding, and with him the other Right Independents, treat with sublime contempt as a "non-Marxian" movement, devoid of serious purpose, and wholly unworthy of any attention from such enlightened statesmen as
