by a spontaneous outburst of the crowd. It is precisely because the crowd may overwhelm and crush permanent troops that we must without fail "manage" to keep up with the spontaneous rise of the masses in our work of "establishing an extremely systematic organisation" among the permanent troops, for the more we "manage" to establish such an organisation the more probable will it be that the permanent troops will not be overwhelmed by the crowd, but will take their place at the head of the crowd. Nadezhdin drops into confusion because he imagines that these systematically organised troops are engaged in something that isolates them from the crowd, when as a matter of fact they are engaged exclusively in all-sided and all-embracing political agitation, i. e., precisely in work that brings them into closer proximity and merges the elemental destructive force of the crowd with the conscious destructive force of the organisation of revolutionists. You gentlemen merely wish to throw the blame for your sins on the shoulders of others. For it is precisely the Svoboda group that includes terror in its programme and by that calls for an organisation of terrorists, and such an organisation would really prevent our troops froin coining into proximity with the crowd which, unfortunately, is still not ours, and which unfortunately, does not yet ask us, or rarely asks us when and how to commence military operations.
"We will overlook the revolution itself," continues Nadezhdin in his effort to scare Iskra, "in the same way as we overlooked recent events which hurled themselves upon us like a bolt from the blue." This sentence together with the one quoted above clearly demonstrates the absurdity of the "eve of the revolution point-of-view" invented by Svoboda.[1] To speak frankly, this special point·of-view" amounts to this that it is too late "now" to discuss and prepare. If that is the case, oh most worthy opponent of "literariness," what was the use of writing a pamphlet of 132 pages on "Questions of Theory and Tactics"?[2] Don't you think that it
- ↑ "The Eve of the Revolution," p. 62.
- ↑ In his Review of Questions of Theory, L. Nadezhdin made almost no contribution whatever to the discussion of questions of theory apart perhaps from the following passage which appears to be a very peculiar one from the "eve of the revolution point-of-view": "Bernsteinism, on the whole, is losing its acuteness for us at the present moment, as also is the question as to whether Mr. Adamovich has proved that Mr. Struve has already deserved dismissal or on the contrary whether Mr. Struve will refute Mr. Adamovich and will refuse to resign—it really makes no difference, because the hour of the revolution has struck" [p. 110]. One can hardly imagine a more striking
161
