Most of the peasant deputies in the First and Second Dumas sided, not with the Left Narodniks, but with the "Trudoviks"[73] and the "Popular Socialists".[74] This is a fact that must not be forgotten or distorted. And, following the Marxists, even the Left Narodniks, in the per sons for example of Vikhlayev, Chernov, and others, have been compelled to admit the bourgeois nature of the Trudovik Popular Socialists!
Let individual workers who sympathise with the Left Narodniks ask their teachers to produce everything the Left Narodniks wrote against the Trudovik Popular Socialists in 1906-07.
In those years mass action by the peasants proved conclusively that the peasantry takes a bourgeois-democratic stand. The Left Narodniks are at best only a small wing of peasant (i.e., bourgeois) democracy in Russia. The workers have supported the peasants (against the feudal landlords), and will continue to do so, but to confuse these classes, to confuse bourgeois democracy with the socialist proletariat, is reactionary adventurism. All class-conscious workers will strenuously combat this, particularly at ths present time when the class cleavage has been made quite clear by the great experience of the mass struggle of 1905-07, and is becoming clearer day by day in our rural districts.
For a very long time, over ten years in fact, Mikhailovsky was the head and guiding spirit of the Russkoye Bogatstvo publicist group. What did this group produce in the great days of 1905-07?
It produced the first liquidators among the democrats!
Let individual workers who sympathise with the Left Narodniks ask their teachers to show them Russkoye Bogatstvo for August 1906, and all that was written by the Left Narodniks when they called this group "Social-Cadets", and so forth!
The Mikhailovsky group brought forth the first liquidators who, in the autumn of 1906, proclaimed an "open party",
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and renounced the "underground" and its slogans two or three years before our Marxist liquidators did so. What came of the "open party" proclaimed by the Myakotins, Peshekhonovs, and other associates of Mikhailovsky? Nothing -- the complete absence of any party whatsoever, and the complete isolation of the "open" group of opportunist Narodniks from the masses. Mikhailovsky, who never renounced the "underground" (or rather, died shortly before his group went over to liquidationism), should not be held fully responsible for the paltry and contemptible opportunism of Messrs. Peshekhonov, Myakotin and Co. But is it not characteristic that in issue No. 3 of Vernaya Mysl, which is dedicated to Mikhailovsky, we again find the corrupt bloc between the "Left" Narodniks and the "Social-Cadets" of Russkoye Bogatstvo ? And if we recall what Mikhailovsky wrote to Lavrov about his attitude towards revolutionaries, shall we not have to admit that, on the whole, the "Social-Cadets" are his faithful successors? We pay tribute to Mikhailovsky for the sincere and skilful struggle he waged against the serf-owning system, the "bureaucracy" (we beg to be excused for this loose term), and so forth, for his respect for the "underground" and the assistance he rendered it, but not for his bourgeois-democratic views, or his vacillating tendencies towards liberalism, or his "Social-Cadet" group of Russkoye Bogatstvo.
It is no accident that the bourgeois democrats in Russia, i.e., in the first place the peasantry, vacillate between the liberal bourgeoisie and the proletariat; that is due to their class position. It is the workers' job to liberate the peasantry from the influence of the liberals and relentlessly to combat "Narodnik" doctrines.