LENIN ON ORGANIZATION 
vailing amateurishness, and divert the active work- 
ers from the serious and essential duty of making 
themselves professional revolutionaries to the task 
of drawing up detailed “paper” statutes on systems 
of election. Only abroad, where we often find 
people assembled who are unable to find a live 
interest for themselves, can this “game of democ- 
racy” develop, especially among small groups. 
In order to demonstrate to the reader all the 
objections to the noble “principle” of democracy 
advocated by ‘“Rabochie Delo” for the revolutionary 
movement, we shall again quote the evidence of a 
witness. The witness, E. Serebyakov, editor of the 
London paper; “Nakanune” (13), has a great weak- 
ness for the “Rabochie Delo” and a great hatred 
for Plekhanov (14) and his followers. In its article 
dealing with the break-up of the foreign “Union of 
Russian Social Democrats,” “Nakanune” took up 
the cause of the “Rabochie Delo” and poured a 
shower of insults over the devoted head of Ple- 
khanov. All the more valuable is this witness 
therefore on the question under consideration. In 
No. 7 of the “Nakanune” (July, 1899), in an article 
entitled “The Manifesto of the Groups for the Self- 
Emancipation of the Workers,” E. Serebyakov talks 
of the “indecency” of raising questions of “self- 
deception,” of supremacy, of the so-called areopagus 
in a serious revolutionary movement. He writes: 
“Myshkin (15), Rogachev, Zhelyabov, Mikhai- 
loy, Perovskaya, Figner and others, never re- 
garded themselves as leaders and were never 
105