The Third Element of the Fraud Triangle: Self-Accusations On October 24, 1989, Jim Bakker and Richard Dorch were indicted on 23 counts of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit fraud. The court sentenced

Full composition of writings. Volume 5. May-December 1901 Lenin Vladimir Ilyich

III. Third element

III. Third element

The expression “third element” or “third parties” was put into use, if we are not mistaken, by the Samara vice-governor, Mr. Kondoidi, in his speech at the opening of the Samara provincial zemstvo assembly in 1900, to designate persons “not belonging to any administration, nor among the representatives of the estates.” The growth in the number and influence of such persons serving in the zemstvo as doctors, technicians, statisticians, agronomists, teachers, etc., has long attracted the attention of our reactionaries, who also nicknamed these hated “third parties” “zemstvo bureaucracy.”

In general, it must be said that our reactionaries, including, of course, the entire higher bureaucracy, show good political instincts. They are so experienced in terms of all sorts of experience in the fight against the opposition, against popular “revolts,” against sectarians, against uprisings, against revolutionaries, that they keep themselves constantly “on the alert” and understand much better than any naive simpletons and “honest nags” the intransigence of the autocracy with whatever independence, honesty, independence of convictions, pride of real knowledge. Having perfectly absorbed the spirit of servility and paperwork attitude to business that reigns throughout the entire hierarchy of Russian officials, they are suspicious of everyone who does not resemble Gogol’s Akaki Akakievich(113) or, using a more modern comparison, a man in a case(114 ).

And in fact: if people performing certain public functions are valued not according to their official position, but according to their knowledge and merits, then doesn’t this logically inevitably lead to freedom of public opinion and public control discussing this knowledge and these advantages? Doesn’t this undermine at the root the privileges of classes and ranks that alone maintain autocratic Russia? Listen to how the same Mr. Kondoidi motivated his dissatisfaction:

“It happens,” he says, “that representatives of the classes, without sufficiently proven grounds, heed the word of intellectuals, even if they were nothing more than civilian employees in the government, only as a result of reference to science or to the teachings of newspaper and magazine writers.” What's it like? Simple “civil servants”, but they undertake to teach “representatives of the classes”! By the way: the zemstvo vowels that the vice-governor is talking about are actually members of the classless institution; but since in our country everything and everyone is imbued with class, since the zemstvos, according to the new situation, have lost a huge share of all their classlessness, then for the sake of brevity we can really say that in Russia there are two ruling “classes”: 1. administration and 2. representatives estates. There is no place for the third element in a class monarchy. And if unruly economic development increasingly undermines the foundations of class by the very growth of capitalism and creates a need for “intellectuals”, the number of which is ever increasing, then one must inevitably expect that the third element will try to expand the narrow boundaries for it.

“The dreams of persons who do not belong either to the administration or to representatives of the estates in the zemstvo,” said the same Mr. Kondoidi, “are only of a fantastic nature, but they can, if they assume political tendencies at their basis, have a harmful side.”

The assumption of “political tendencies” is only a diplomatic expression of the belief that they exist. And “dreams” are called here, if you like, all assumptions that arise for a doctor - from the interests of medicine, for a statistician - from the interests of statistics and do not take into account the interests of the ruling classes. In themselves, these dreams are fantastic, but they fuel political discontent, as you can see.

But here is an attempt by another administrator, the head of one of the central provinces, to give a different motivation for dissatisfaction with the third element. According to him, the activities of the zemstvo entrusted to him The province “every year is moving further and further away from the fundamental principles on which the Regulations on Zemstvo Institutions are based (115).” By this provision, the local population is called upon to manage the affairs of local benefits and needs; Meanwhile, due to the indifferent attitude of the majority of landowners to the right granted to them, “the zemstvo assemblies took on the character of one formalities, and affairs are carried out by councils, the character of which makes one desire very much.” This “resulted in the formation of extensive offices at the administrations and an invitation to the zemstvo service specialists, - statisticians, agronomists, teachers, sanitary doctors, etc. - who, feeling their educational, and sometimes and mental superiority over zemstvo leaders, began to show everything greater and greater independence, which is especially achieved by opening various congresses, and at the councils - councils. As a result, the entire zemstvo economy found itself in the hands of persons having nothing in common with the local population.” Although “among these people there are a lot of individuals who are quite well-intentioned and deserve full respect, they cannot look at their service other than as a means of subsistence, and they can only be interested in local benefits and needs to the extent that their personal well-being depends on them.” " - “In zemstvo affairs, according to the head of the province, the mercenary cannot replace the owner.” This motivation can be called both more cunning and more frank, depending on how you look at it. It is more cunning, since it is silent about political trends and tries to reduce the basis of its judgment exclusively to the interests of local benefits and needs. It is more frank, because it directly contrasts the “mercenary” to the owner. This is the original point of view of the Russian Kit Kitichs (116), who, when hiring some “teacher,” are guided first of all and most of all by market prices for this type of professional services. The real masters of everything are the owners, so speaks a representative of the very camp from which praises of Russia are constantly pouring out with its firm power, independent of anyone and above the classes, freed, thank God, from the domination of selfish interests over the people's life that we see in Western countries corrupted by parliamentarism. And since the owner is the master, then he must be the master of the medical, statistical, and educational “business”: our pompadour does not hesitate to draw this conclusion, which contains a direct recognition of the political supremacy of the propertied classes. Moreover, he is not embarrassed - and this is especially curious - to admit that these “specialists” feel their educational and sometimes mental superiority over zemstvo leaders. Yes, of course, there are no means against mental superiority, except for strict measures...

And recently our reactionary press had a particularly opportune opportunity to repeat the call for these measures of severity. The reluctance of intellectuals to allow themselves to be treated as simple mercenaries, as sellers of labor (and not as citizens performing certain public functions), has always led, from time to time, to conflicts between administrative tycoons, either with doctors, who collectively resigned, or with technicians etc. Recently, conflicts between government departments and statisticians have taken on an epidemic character.

It was noted in Iskra back in May (No. 4) that the local authorities (in Yaroslavl) had long been looking askance at the statistics and, after the March events in St. Petersburg, they did “clean up” the bureau and suggested that the head “from now on accept students from a strict choice, so that one cannot even think about them that they could ever turn out to be unreliable.” The correspondence “Sedition in Vladimir on the Klyazma” (Iskra, No. 5, June) outlined the general situation of the suspected statistics and the reasons for the dislike of them on the part of the governor, factory owners and landowners. The dismissal of Vladimir statisticians for submitting a telegram expressing sympathy for Annensky (beaten on Kazan Square on March 4) led to the actual closure of the bureau, and since non-resident statisticians refused to serve in the zemstvo, which does not know how to defend the interests of its employees, the local gendarmerie had to act in role as a mediator between the fired statisticians and the governor. “The gendarme came to the apartments of some statisticians and invited them to apply again to join the bureau,” but his mission was a complete failure. Finally, in the August issue (No. 7) of Iskra, an “incident in the Yekaterinoslav zemstvo” was described, in which the “pasha” of Mr. Rodzianko (chairman of the provincial zemstvo administration) fired the statisticians for failure to comply with the “instruction” to keep a diary and with this dismissal caused the resignation of all other members of the bureau and protest letters from Kharkov statisticians (cited in the same issue of Iskra). Further into the forest there is more firewood. The Kharkov pasha, Mr. Gordeenko (also the chairman of the provincial zemstvo council), intervened and told the statisticians of “his” zemstvo that he would not tolerate “any meetings of employees within the walls of the council on issues not related to official duties.” Further, the Kharkov statisticians did not have time to fulfill their intention to demand the dismissal of the spy who was among them (Antonovich), when the administration fired the head of statistics. bureau, again causing the departure of all statisticians.

The extent to which these incidents agitated the entire mass of zemstvo statistical officials can be seen, for example, from the letter of the Vyatka statisticians, who tried to thoroughly motivate their reluctance to join the movement and for this were rightly called in Iskra (No. 9) “Vyatka strikebreakers.” "

But Iskra, of course, noted only some cases, far from all the conflicts that occurred, according to legal newspapers, in addition in the provinces of St. Petersburg, Olonetsk, Nizhny Novgorod, Tavricheskaya, Samara (to the conflicts we add here cases of dismissal of several at once statisticians, since these cases aroused strong discontent and ferment). The general level of suspicion and shamelessness of the provincial authorities can be seen, for example, from the following:

“Head of the Tauride Bureau S. M. Blekloe in the submitted government “Report on the survey of the Dnieper district during May and June 1901” says that work in this district was accompanied by previously unprecedented conditions: although they were allowed to perform their duties by the governor, provided with the appropriate documents and had, on the basis of orders from the provincial authorities, the right to assistance from local authorities, the researchers were surrounded by extreme suspicion district police who were monitoring on their heels, expressing their distrust in the most rough form it got to the point that, according to one peasant, a police officer rode behind the statisticians and asked the peasants “whether the statisticians are propagating harmful ideas against the state and the fatherland.” The statisticians had, according to Mr. Bleklov, “to encounter various obstacles and difficulties that not only interfered with their work, but also deeply affected self-esteem... Often statisticians find themselves in the position of some persons under investigation about which a secret inquiry was carried out, which, however, was well known to everyone, and about which it was considered necessary to warn. From here, everyone can understand what an unbearably difficult moral state they often had to endure.”

Not a bad illustration of the history of zemstvo-statistical conflicts and the characteristics of supervision of the “third element” in general!

It is not surprising that the reactionary press attacked the new “rebels.” "Moskovskie Vedomosti" published a thunderous editorial "Strike of Zemstvo Statisticians." (No. 263, September 24) and a special article “The Third Element” by N.A. Znamensky (No. 279, October 10). The “third element” is “arrogant,” the newspaper wrote, and responds with “systematic opposition and strikes” to attempts to introduce “necessary service discipline.” The fault lies with the zemstvo liberals who dismissed the employees.

“There is no doubt that some streamlining of zemstvo assessment and statistical work was undertaken by the most sober and reasonable zemstvo leaders, who did not want to allow management licentiousness further and under liberal opposition flag. Both the opposition and strikes must finally open their eyes to who they are dealing with in person that mental proletariat who, staggering from one province to another, was not engaged in statistical research, or by educating local teenagers in a social-democratic spirit.

In any case, in the form of “zemstvo statistical conflicts,” the prudent part of zemstvo leaders receive a useful lesson for themselves. We believe that she will now see quite clearly what kind of snake, under the guise "third element" zemstvo institutions warmed themselves in their chests.”

We, for our part, also have no doubt that these screams and howls of the faithful watchdog of the autocracy (it is known that Katkov “himself” called himself this way, who managed to “charge” “M. Ved.” with his spirit for so long) “will open eyes" to many who did not yet fully understand the irreconcilability of autocracy with the interests of social development, with the interests of the intelligentsia in general, with the interests of any real social cause that does not consist of embezzlement and betrayal.

For us, Social Democrats, this small picture of the campaign against the “third element” and “zemstvo-statistical conflicts” should serve as an important lesson. We must gain new faith in the omnipotence of the working-class movement we lead, seeing that the excitement in the advanced revolutionary class is being transmitted to other classes and strata of society, that it has led not only to an unprecedented rise in the revolutionary spirit among students, but also to the beginning awakening of the countryside, and to strengthening self-confidence and readiness to fight in such social groups that (as groups) have hitherto remained little responsive.

Social excitement is growing in Russia among all the people, in all their classes, and it is our duty, the duty of revolutionary Social Democrats, to direct all efforts to be able to use it to explain to the advanced working intelligentsia what kind of ally they have both in the peasantry and among students, and among the intelligentsia in general, to teach them to use the lights of public protest that flare up here and there. We will be able to fulfill the role of the foremost freedom fighter only when the working class, led by a militant revolutionary party, without forgetting for a moment its special position in modern society and its special world-historical tasks of liberating humanity from economic slavery, at the same time raises national banner of struggle for freedom and will attract under this banner all those whom Messrs. The Sipyagins, Kondoidis and this whole gang are so diligently pushing into the ranks of the dissatisfied from the most diverse strata of society.

For this, it is only necessary that we take into our movement not only the inexorably revolutionary theory developed by the centuries-long development of European thought, but also the revolutionary energy and revolutionary experience bequeathed to us by our Western European and Russian predecessors, and not slavishly adopt all sorts of forms of opportunism from which we begin Our Western comrades who have suffered from them and who are so greatly delaying our path to victory are already getting off with relatively little.

The Russian proletariat now faces the most difficult, but also the most rewarding revolutionary task: to crush the enemy, which the long-suffering Russian intelligentsia could not overcome, and to take a place in the ranks of the international army of socialism.

The Third Rome is dead, long live the Third Rome! Every nation has a certain stable set of ideas about itself, about its own character, its history, its purpose - all this is called national self-awareness. It is not at all surprising that every people sees itself