Written: Written January 19 (February 1), 1908
Published:
First published in 1931 in Lenin Miscellany XVI.
Published according to the manuscript.
Source:
Lenin
Collected Works,
Foreign Languages Publishing House,
1962,
Moscow,
Volume 8,
page 124.
Translated: Bernard Isaacs and The Late Isidor Lasker
Transcription\Markup:
R. Cymbala
Public Domain:
Lenin Internet Archive
(2003).
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
The foreign press reported that at recent conferences in Tsarskoye Selo (after the victory of January 9), with or without the tsar attending, the question of the desirability of peace with Japan was animatedly discussed. In principle, all who surround the adored monarch stand for peace now. The number of state dignitaries who ten days ago were emphatically for continuing the war has now dwindled considerably, and many of them have now become convinced advocates of peace.
We mention this for the information of the simple Social-Democrats of the so-called Central Organ of our Party, who failed to understand that the phrases about “peace at any price”, while remaining empty phrases (for no one asked the opinion of the Social-Democrats, and their opinion counted for nought), actually, in the present situation, have merely played into the hands of the frightened adherents of the autocracy. Our new-Iskrists missed the change of mood on the part of the whole European bourgeoisie (which began with sympathy towards Japan and has long since started to shift in favour of Russia through fear of the revolution—cf. Frankfurter Zeitung and others). Now they miss the fact that the empty, hackneyed phrases about peace at any price are beginning to be utilised also by the St. Petersburg Ugryum-Burcheyevs[1] for their own purpose.
[1] Ugryum-Burcheyev—a type of dull and narrow-minded dignitary depicted by Saltykov-Shchedrin in his story History of a Town.
By the St. Petersburg Ugryum-Burcheyevs Lenin meant members of the palace clique of Tsar Nicholas II.
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