Written: Written October 14, 1904
Published:
First published in 1930 in Lenin Miscellany XV.
Sent from Geneva to Moscow.
Printed from the original in Krupskaya’s handwriting.
Source:
Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
[1977],
Moscow,
Volume 43,
pages 128b-129.
Translated: Martin Parker and Bernard Isaacs
Transcription\Markup:
R. Cymbala
Public Domain:
Lenin Internet Archive
(2005).
You may freely copy, distribute,
display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and
commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet
Archive” as your source.
• README
14/X.
Our very dear Friends,
We sent you some three weeks ago a letter through Irina.[2] We heartily endorse your plan. Write if you have a chance. Bonch and Lenin have undertaken the publishing end. Down with Bonapartism!, Our Misunderstandings and To the Party have already appeared, and On the New Road, The Fight for a Congress and On Socialism are coming out shortly. According to our estimates 14 committees, Ii of them with full voting rights, have already declared for the congress. All the attempts of the C.O., the C.C. and the Council to hold up the agitation for the congress have proved fruitless. The C.C. saw that the Majority also has to be reckoned with and is evidently ready to make concessions. With the Minority too they haven’t been able to achieve full unity. In a word, they have got into a mess.
Formerly the C.O. played the committees off against the C.C. and baited the C.C., now it is playing the periphery off against the committees and trying to prove that the opinion of the committees is not the opinion of the Party, and that strictly speaking there is no Party. They have done everything they could to split the Party and now they shout that the Party does not exist.
The position of the C.C. has untied our hands and life now is far easier than before. Of course there is some bad news, for example, Brodyaga has gone with the Minority, so has Samsonov, but that can’t be helped. We shall go on working and upholding our views, and time will tell. A new pamphlet by Trotsky came out recently, under the editorship of Iskra, as was announced. This makes it the “Credo” as it were of the new Iskra. The pamphlet is a pack of brazen lies, a distortion of the facts. And this is done under the editor ship of the C.O. The work of the Iskra group is vilified in every way, the Economists, it is alleged, did far more, the Iskra group displayed no initiative, they gave no thought to the proletariat, were more concerned with the bourgeois intelligentsia, introduced a deadly bureaucracy everywhere—their work was reduced to carrying out the programme of the famous “Credo”. The Second Congress was, in his words, a reactionary attempt to consolidate sectarian methods of organisation, etc. The pamphlet is a slap in the face both for the present Editorial Board of the C.O. and for all Party workers. Reading a pamphlet of this kind you can see clearly that the “Minority” has indulged in so much lying and falsehood that it will be incapable of producing anything viable, and one wants to fight, here there is some thing worth fighting for.
Kol’s wife is well, she is in Yekaterinoslav.
Warm greetings to all of you.
Starick & Co.
[1] Written by Krupskaya on Lenin’s instructions.—Ed.
[2] See present volume, Document 88.—Ed.
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