Internet archives ---Re: Query on Father Gapon

[Saul Thomas <stthomas@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 01:03 PM 2000-05-13 -0500, you wrote:
>Lenin did write an article (in which he called trotsky a windbag)
>claiming that many more Father Gapons were essential for the revolutionary
>movement. (I can't cite the article with precision because I've misplaced the
>volume of the CW that contains it.)
>
>Carrol

To Carrol and other all other comrades not quite as cyber-savvy as me:

There is no longer any need to deal with all of those arcane and antiquated
devices you call "books". There are several internet archives that are
fairly likely to have the communist classics and non-classics you might
want to refer to.

These three sites have Lenin archives, as well as archives for other authors:

http://www.marx2mao.org/

http://www.maoism.org/index.html

http://csf.colorado.edu/mirrors/marxists.org/archive/index.htm

Some of these archive sites also allow you to do text searches, which makes
finding the right article or quote quite easy.

For example, the article Carrol mentions above is V. I. Lenin,
SOCIAL-DEMOCRACY AND THE PROVISIONAL REVOLUTIONARY GOVERNMENT, available at
http://www.cruzio.com/~marx2mao/Lenin/SDPRG05.html
(I found it by using the search engine for the Lenin Library on the Marx to
Mao site. I searched for "Gapon", "Trotsky", and "windbag").

Here is the quote Carrol (amazingly) remembered:
-----
If that windbag Trotsky now writes (unfortunately, side by side with
Parvus) that "a Father Gapon could appear only once", that "there is no
room for a second Gapon", he does so simply because he is a windbag. If
there were no room in Russia for a second Gapon, there would be no room for
a truly "great", consummated democratic revolution. To become great, to
evoke 1789-93, not 1848-50, and to surpass those years, it must rouse the
vast masses to active life, to heroic efforts, to "fundamental historic
creativeness"; it must raise them out of frightful ignorance, unparalleled
oppression, incredible backwardness, and abysmal dullness. The revolution
is already raising them and will raise them completely; the government
itself is facilitating the process by its desperate resistance. But, of
course, there can be no question of a mature political consciousness, of a
Social-Democratic consciousness of these masses or their numerous "native"
popular leaders or even "muzhik" leaders. They cannot become
Social-Democrats at once without first passing a number of revolutionary
tests, not only because of their ignorance (revolution, we repeat,
enlightens with marvellous speed), but because their class position is not
proletarian, because the objective logic of historical development
confronts them at the present time with the tasks, not of a socialist, but
of a democratic revolution.

In this revolution, the revolutionary proletariat will participate with the
utmost energy, sweeping aside the miserable tail-ism of some and the
revolutionary phrases of others. It will bring class definiteness and
consciousness into the dizzying whirlwind of events, and march on
intrepidly and unswervingly, not fearing, but fervently desiring, the
revolutionary-democratic dictatorship, fighting for the republic and for
complete republican liberties, fighting for substantial economic reforms,
in order to create for itself a truly large arena, an arena worthy of the
twentieth century, in which to carry on the struggle for socialism.