Written: Written November 10, 1910
Published:
First published in 1933 in Lenin Miscellany XXV.
Sent from Paris to St. Petersburg.
Printed from a typewritten copy found in police records.
Source:
Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
[1977],
Moscow,
Volume 43,
page 259.
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.
Dear V. D.,
I wrote you the other day.[1] Am writing again today because I have received some extremely disturbing news, which seems to indicate some dissention at your end. Dissention over what, I cannot understand. What the trouble is I do not know.[2] You really must not leave us here without information—afterwards we are blamed for holding up things. Why shouldn’t like-minded people be able to work together on a newspaper, once there is agreement on the main thing, namely, not to allow the Potresovs and similar riffraff from Nasha Zarya to come anywhere near it?[3] And such agreement does exist. We shall notify them today of our opinion that a third be included (there was a c]ear understanding, after all, that the third place belonged to us).[4] I am informing you in order that there should be no misunderstanding. The third has one-third of the decisive say—is that so much? Are you against that? I hope not. I would be very glad if this business could be settled without friction. It is time, high time, to get started on the paper and the journal too. As regards the journal, we are not asking for much: find us an executive secretary and a couple of applicants for permission to publish.[5] Surely that is not so difficult to arrange? Well, I shall wait for word from you.
I hope that the matter of the discontented will now be settled. After all, there is nothing to quarrel about.
[2] A reference to the intention of some Bolsheviks in Russia to make Zvezda the organ of the Social-Democratic group in the Third Duma, to which end the Menshevik Duma deputies Gegechkori and Kuznetsov were invited to contribute to it. This led to misunderstandings in the Editorial Board.
[3] Nasha Zarya (Our Dawn)—a legal monthly published by the Menshevik liquidators in 1910–14 in St. Petersburg.
[4] It had been learned from V. D. Bonch-Bruyevich that the misunderstanding was due to I. P. Pokrovsky’s opposition to the inclusion in the Zvezda Editorial Board of the Bolshevik Turutin, for which Lenin’s consent had been obtained beforehand.
[5] A reference to the journal Mysl (see Note 169).
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