Written: Written May 17, 1916
Published:
First published in 1964 in Collected Works, Fifth (Russian) Ed., Vol. 49.
Sent from Zurich to Berne.
Printed from the original.
Source:
Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
[1977],
Moscow,
Volume 43,
pages 537b-538a.
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
You are 1,000 times wrong about the Japs. Let them publish separately in their own name. We can’t have them shuffling off the responsibility for this folly upon us: let them answer for it themselves. I am for a discussion, but not for an agreement with the Editorial Board of “imperialist Economists”, and I shall have nothing whatever to do with such a journal, as I have written many a time.
This must be put an end to. It’s no use dragging it out. We must announce Sbornik Sotsial-Demokrata.
About the Distributing Committee, there can be no question of having it transferred here. We have no one here, while in Berne we have Zina+Inessa (how could you allow her to leave?? I’m surprised!!)+Shklovsky+Ilyin+Karpinsky+Kasparov. They must be organised and none of them allowed to leave.
I would like very much to get Avanti!, as I see it here only in the library. I have not seen what you write about.
We cannot promise A—der 100–150 frs.[1] You can’t throw promises about and then find you haven’t got the money (“pressure on the groups” are mere words). A six-month trip can only do good, as he won’t be going home before that in any case, and Norway is only a place for scandal.
The Stellungnahme should be put in, as the Manifesto and all the rest are all poor. We must show that we said this before more exactly and fully. This is more important than the article. How much space do the documents occupy (the Manifesto+theses+resolution on the I.S.B.)?[2] Write more precisely.
I shall send the material in a day or two.
And so, you have sent Sukhanov? At last you have answered, after 20 inquiries. I am so surprised at your punctuality that I am writing specially to Minin about it: hurray![3]
Salut, Lenin
I have received Demain about the conference.[4] Have you got it?
P.S. Minin suggests publishing a collection of decisions of international
congresses.[5] We already have 300 copies (on 70 pages) up to
1904. Add (paste in) 1904–12 and a preface. To be sold at
50 centimes. It will pay for itself.
I am for it. Answer.
[1] A. Shlyapnikov having raised the question of going to America for several months, Zinoviev asked Lenin not to consent to Shlyapnikov’s departure and to promise to remit 100–150 francs to him monthly in the course of the next six months.
[2] This refers to the “Proposals of the R.S.D.L.P. Central Committee to the Second Socialist Conference” and the decisions adopted at the Kienthal Conference, namely: the appeal “To the Peoples Who Are Ruined and Slaughtered”, the theses on “The Attitude of the Proletariat to the Question of Peace” and the resolution “On the Attitude to the International Socialist Bureau at The Hague”.
[3] The reference is to an article of Sukhanov’s “Our Left Parties”, which was to have been forwarded to Minin (V. A. Karpinsky).
[4] Reports on the Kienthal Conference were published in No. 5. of the journal Demain which appeared on May 15, 1916. Probably Lenin is referring to the editorial in that issue entitled “Zimmerwald” from the pen of Henri Guilbeaux.
Demain—a journal of the French internationalists, appeared in Geneva from 1916 to 1918. The last issue, No. 31, came out in Moscow in 1919 as the mouthpiece of a group of French Communists.
[5] A collection of decisions of international congresses of the Second International was to have been published by the War Prisoners Relief Committee under the Committee of the R.S.D.L.P. Organisations Abroad. It was intended for circulation in the P.O.W. camps located in Germany and Austria-Hungary. The collection was not published.
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