A long time ago I read something in a book I can’t remember, and I’ve tried to find it many times on the Internet over many years, only to no avail.
It’s supposedly a Russian term that refers to what happens when you try to straighten a twisted stick so powerfully that you end up twisting it the other way. As far as I remember, it’s a metaphor for overfixing a problem that you end up creating a different kind of problem.
Have you ever come across anything that resembles this, in your readings or browsing?
Lenin refers to stick bending.
Tony Cliff spells out the meaning , " I believe there is an important and unsatisfactory way of attempting to explain Lenin’s purportedly elitist formulations in WITBD within today’s socialist movement, which is to claim that Lenin is simply “bending the stick.” This formulation seems to have been at least largely introduced by Tony Cliff of the British Socialist Workers Party in his important book Building the Party. In Building the Party, Cliff writes, “At every stage of the struggle Lenin would look for what he regarded as the key link in the chain of development. He would then repeatedly emphasize the importance of this link, to which all others must be subordinated. After the event, he would say: ‘We overdid it. We bent the stick too far,’ by which he did not mean that he had been wrong to do so.”
) At the 1903 Congress, it is Martov—who in this same series of meetings becomes the leader of the Menshevik faction of the Russian party—who says that Lenin “made a confession to us” that “‘the stick had been bent in one direction, and so we bent it the other way.’” Depending on which translation you use, Lenin may have also used the metaphor in the 1903 debates
See On Lenin's Stickbending | International Socialist Review
The interpretation is that its a common russian expression, and they knew they were hardline and experimental… possibly too hard.
The question is whether they said it to advise being cautious,
Or whether to advise its not their personal fault that the “stick breaks”,its the “sticks” fault for not being strong enough… In real life the stick is the people and their lot…