Written: 1 November 1922
First Published: 1925 in French in Clarté No. 71
First published in Russian in 1930; Published according to the manuscript
Source: Lenin’s Collected Works, 2nd English Edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1965, Volume 33, page 434
Translated: David Skvirsky and George Hanna
Transcription\HTML Markup:
David Walters &
R. Cymbala
Copyleft: V. I. Lenin Internet Archive (www.marx.org) 2002. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License
November 15, 1922
Dear Friends,
I take this opportunity to send you best greetings. I have been seriously ill, and for over a year I have not been able to see a single one of the productions of your group. I hope that your organisation “des anciens combattants ”[Verterans—Transcriber] still exists and is growing stronger not only numerically, but also spiritually, in the sense of intensifying and spreading the struggle against imperialist war. It is worth devoting one's whole life to the struggle against this kind of war; it is a struggle in which one must be ruthless and chase to the furthermost corners of the earth all the sophistry that is uttered in its defence.
Best greetings.
Yours,
Lenin
[1] The Clarté group of progressive writers and cultural workers was organized by Henri Barbusse in 1919 on the basis ofl'Association Républicaine des Anciens Combattants. Similar groups were set up in other countries, and together they formed the War Veterans International, whose main motto was: War on war. The Clarté group included supporters of the Third International—Henri Barbusse, Anatole France, Paul Vaillant-Couturier—and pacifist writers—Romain Rolland, Stefan Zweig, H. G. Wells, Thomas Hardy, Upton Sinclair, Jules Romain, and others. The group published a monthly magazine of the same name (in Paris from October 1919 to January 1928), which in its first years was quite popular in France and abroad. However, the ideological disagreements within the group and its organisational weakness did not permit it to become a large and influential organization. Soon after Barbusse resigned as editor (in April 1924), the magazine lost its progressive significance. It ceased publication in 1928 and the group disintegrated.