The Bolshevik Press and the Fight for Workers Revolution

(Quote of the Week)

As Workers Vanguard enters its annual subscription drive, we print below excerpts from an article by V.I. Lenin celebrating the tenth anniversary of Pravda, the Bolshevik daily newspaper founded in April 1912 amidst an upsurge of militant class struggle in tsarist Russia. The article was written in 1922, as the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution inspired, in the words of Lenin, new Chartists (referring to the revolutionary tradition of the mid 19th-century proletarian movement in Britain), new Varlins (Eugène Varlin, a socialist leader of the 1871 Paris Commune) and new Liebknechts (Wilhelm Liebknecht, 19th-century Marxist leader of the German socialist movement).

The tenth anniversary of a Bolshevik daily published in Russia…. Only ten years have elapsed! But measured in terms of our struggle and movement they are equal to a hundred years. For the pace of social development in the past five years has been positively staggering if we apply the old yardstick of European philistines like the heroes of the Second and Two-and-a-Half Internationals. These civilised philistines are accustomed to regard as “natural” a situation in which hundreds of millions of people (over a thousand million, to be exact) in the colonies and in semi-dependent and poor countries tolerate the treatment meted out to Indians or Chinese, tolerate incredible exploitation, and outright depredation, and hunger, and violence, and humiliation, all in order that “civilised” men might “freely,” “democratically,” according to “parliamentary procedure,” decide whether the booty should be divided up peacefully, or whether ten million or so must be done to death in this division of the imperialist booty, yesterday between Germany and Britain, tomorrow between Japan and the U.S.A. (with France and Britain participating in one form or another)….

At this most difficult moment it would be most harmful for revolutionaries to indulge in self-deception. Though Bolshevism has become an international force, though in all the civilised and advanced countries new Chartists, new Varlins, new Liebknechts have been born, and are growing up as legal (just as legal as our Pravda was under the tsars ten years ago) Communist Parties, nonetheless, for the time being, the international bourgeoisie still remains incomparably stronger than its class enemy. This bourgeoisie, which has done everything in its power to hamper the birth of proletarian power in Russia and to multiply tenfold the dangers and suffering attending its birth, is still in a position to condemn millions and tens of millions to torment and death through its whiteguard and imperialist wars, etc. That is something we must not forget. And we must skilfully adapt our tactics to this specific situation. The bourgeoisie is still able freely to torment, torture and kill. But it cannot halt the inevitable and—from the standpoint of world history—not far distant triumph of the revolutionary proletariat.

—V.I. Lenin, “On the Tenth Anniversary of Pravda” (May 1922)