dictatorship of the proletariat.” (See the previous quotation!)
A greater lack of sense and more harm to the revolution than this attitude of the “Left” revolutionaries cannot be imagined. Why, if we in Russia, after two and a half years of incredible victories over the Russian bourgeoisie and the Entente, had demanded that entrance into the Trade Unions must be conditional upon the “acceptance of the dictatorship,” we should have committed a stupid act, impaired our influence over the masses, and helped the Mensheviks. For the whole of the Communist problem is to be able to convince the backward, to work in their midst, and not to set up a barrier between us and them, a barrier of artificial childishly “Left” slogans.
There can be no doubt that Messrs. Gompers, Jouhaux, Henderson, Legien, etc., are very grateful to such “Left” revolutionaries who, like the German “Opposition-in-principle” Party (Heaven preserve us from such “principles”) or like revolutionaries in the American “Industrial Workers of the World,” preach the necessity of quitting reactionary Trade Unions and of refusing to work in them. Undoubtedly the leaders of opportunism will have recourse to all the tricks of bourgeois diplomacy, will appeal to the help of bourgeois governments, to priests, police, courts, in order to prevent Communism from entering the Trade Unions, by all and every means to put them out, to make their work inside these organizations as unpleasant as possible, to insult, hound and persecute them. In is necessary to be able to withstand all this, to go the whole length of any sacrifice, if need be, to resort to strategy and adroitness, illegal proceedings, reticence and subterfuge, to anything in order to penetrate into the Trade Unions, remain in them, and carry on Communist work inside them, at any cost. Under Czarism until 1905 we had no “legal possibilities,” but when Zubatov, the secret service agent, organized Black Hundred workers’ meetings and workmen’s societies for the purpose of forreting out revolutionaries and fighting them, we sent members of our party into these meetings and societies. (I personally remember one such comrade, Babushkine, an eminent Petrograd workman, who was shot by the Czar’s generals in 1906.) They put us in touch with the masses, ac-
