LENIN ON ORGANIZATION 
capable of leading it to victory amid great difficulties 
and dangers. 
One partial function of the Party cleansing, I 
should say, is to purge it of former Mensheviks*. 
In my opinion, of the Mensheviks who joined the 
Party since the beginning of 1918 only about one- 
hundredth part should be allowed to remain and 
even these should be tested three or four times over. 
Why? Because during the period 1918-1921 the 
Mensheviks as a class revealed two peculiarities: 
one, a capacity for adapting themselves, for “adher- 
ing” themselves to the prevailing movement among 
the workers; secondly, a still greater capacity for 
faithfully serving the White Guards, serving them 
in deed while renouncing them in word. Both these 
capacities follow naturally from the whole history 
of Menshevism. We have only to recall Axelrod’s 
“Labor Congress,” the relations of the Mensheviks 
to the Cadets (and to the monarchy) in word and 
in deed, etc., etc. The Mensheviks “adhere” them- 
selves to the Russian Communist Party not merely 
and not even primarily from Macchiavilism (al- 
though as far as the methods of bourgeois diploma- 
cy are concerned, the Mensheviks since 1903 have 
shown that they are past masters in that art), but 
because of their “pliability.” An opportunist is dis- 
tinguished by his pliability (although pliability is 
not always opportunism), and the Mensheviks, 
being opportunists, adapt themselves, so to speak, 
* Comrade Lenin, is here, of course, referring mainly to 
former Menshevik intellectuals.—Editor, 
299