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Lenin Collected Works:
Volume 43
Preface by
Progress Publishers
Volume 43 contains letters, notes and telegrams written from 1893 to
the Great October Socialist Revolution in 1917 and published in
volumes 46, 47, 48 and 49 of the Fifth (Russian) Edition of the
Collected Works. They are an essential complement to the
correspondence published in volumes 34, 35 and 36 of the present
edition.
Noteworthy are Lenin's letters to P. P. Maslov relating to
the beginnings of the working-class movement and the early
spread of Marxism in Russia. They reveal his keen interest
in the economic situation in Russia and contain a scientific
critique of the economic views of the liberal Narodniks
(V. Y. Postnikov, V. P. Vorontsov, and others).
Included in the present volume are many documents from the
period of struggle for the creation of a Marxist party in
Russia. Uncompromising struggle against Right opportunism
(Economism and, later, Menshevism) and the anarchistic
petty-bourgeois revolutionariness of the Left Narodniks, on
the one hand, and against bourgeois liberalism, which sought
to subordinate the working-class and democratic movement to
its ends, on the other, is the main theme of the letters
written in this period.
Stressing the need to build an independent proletarian
Marxist party of a new type, Lenin underscored the
importance of open political struggle against opportunists
of all shades, for the political independence and unity of
the working class movement in Russia. “Of course," he
wrote, “struggle in the press will cause more ill
feeling and give us a good many hard knocks, but we are not
so thin-skinned as to fear knocks! To wish for struggle
without knocks, differences without struggle, would be the
height of naïveté,
and if the struggle is waged openly it ... will lead,
I repeat, a hundred times faster to lasting
unity” (p. 48).
The letters throw light on the vast effort Lenin invested
into founding Iskra, the first all-Russia political
newspaper, and the journal Zarya, which played an
exceptional role in the establishment of a Marxist party of
the new type. All of Lenin's editorial and organisational
work, which ranged from laying down the ideological
guidelines, selecting the authors and discussing and
reviewing the materials submitted for publication to the
transportation and circulation of the paper in Russia, is
vividly reflected in these letters.
A number of letters written after the Second Congress of the
Party have been included in this volume. They do much to
round out the picture of the struggle waged by the
Bolsheviks against the Menshevik splitters, showing how, at
a time when the Menshevik leaders sought to break up the
united party that had just taken shape, Lenin passionately
fought for its unity, to prevent the division of local Party
organisations. Of particular interest are the letters to
Yelena Stasova, F. V. Lengnik, V. P. Nogin, and
I. I. Radchenko, and to the Moscow and other local Party
committees.
Stressing the revolutionary services rendered by the old
Iskra and exposing the Mensheviks, including
Trotsky, who denied in a slanderous pamphlet the importance
of both Iskra and the Second Party Congress, Lenin
wrote: "Beading 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
something worth fighting for” (p. 129).
The letters show what colossal effort Lenin devoted to
restoring the central institutions of the Party, launching
the Bolsheviks' Central Organ, the newspaper
Vperyod, and preparing for the Third Congress of
the R.S.D.L.P.
This volume also contains a number of letters relating to
the period of the first Russian revolution, shedding light
on the tactics of the Bolsheviks in the bourgeois-democratic
revolution. For instance, the letter to
l'Humanité correspondent Etienne Avenard
demonstrates the importance of
the hegemony of the proletariat in the bourgeois-democratic
revolution, the correctness of the Bolshevik tactical line
and the need for the alliance of the proletariat and the
democratic peasantry against the “baseness and
treachery of the bourgeoisie, who are day by day becoming
more and more counter-revolutionary” (p. 174).
A considerable number of letters relate to the period of
reaction, among them many to Camille Huysmans, Secretary of
the International Socialist Bureau of the Second
International, with whom Lenin corresponded in the capacity
of representative of the Central Committee of the
R.S.D.L.P. There are also letters to other leaders of the
international working-class movement testifying to the broad
connections Lenin and the Central Committee of the
R.S.D.L.P. had with this movement. They illustrate the
unflagging struggle Lenin waged against opportunism, for
revolutionary tactics in the working-class movement, for
unity in the ranks of the revolutionary Marxists and for the
fraternal solidarity of the working people the world over.
A notable place among the letters of this period is occupied
by correspondence bearing on the struggle against the
Mensheviks and Trotsky, who impeded and sabotaged the work
of the Party's central institutions, and also against the
Vperyod group, the otzovists and ultimatumists,
whose “Left” phraseology and adventuristic
policy threatened to isolate the Party from the working
class, to divorce it from the masses, and virtually to
liquidate it. Lenin exposed the organisation by the
otzovists of a Party school on Capri as a factional scheme
and worked for a long time to organise a real Party school
for revolutionary workers.
The letters written in the period of the new revolutionary
upswing deal with the consolidation of the under ground
proletarian party and with the struggle against
liquidationism. Liquidationism, which first asserted itself
among the Mensheviks in the period of reaction, continued to
cause great harm to the, working class and its Party even
after a new upsurge had begun in the revolutionary
movement. Combating the liquidators, who underrated illegal
work and urged renouncing underground methods, Lenin
focussed the attention of Party cadres on combining illegal and legal forms
of activity—utilisation of the Duma rostrum, participation in workers'
funds and other legal societies, etc. This volume includes several documents
exposing the conference called by the liquidators, who set up the
short-lived August anti-Party bloc.
A number of letters are directed against the conciliators. “You
cannot sit between two stools," Lenin wrote, “either you are with
the liquidators or against them” (p. 271). These letters afford an
idea of the difference between the tactics used to combat the anti-Party
trends and the approach to those who sought reconciliation with these
trends. While calling for uncompromising struggle against the liquidators
on the main issues of principle, Lenin counselled taking a different line
towards the conciliators, explaining things to them in order to win them
over. In a letter to L. B. Kamenev commenting on the latter's pamphlet Two
Tactics, he wrote: “We must not call for a break with
the conciliators. This is quite uncalled for and incorrect. A
'persuasive' tone should be adopted towards them, by no means should they
be antagonised” (p. 279).
The irreconcilable struggle waged by the Bolsheviks against the
liquidators ended in the expulsion of the latter from the Party at the
Sixth (Prague) Conference.
The volume includes a large number of letters to the editorial boards of
the legal Bolshevik newspapers Zvezda, Nevskaya Zvezda, and
especially Pravda. The advice contained in these letters (as well
as his articles) determined the political and ideological orientation of
Pravda, its uncompromising stand towards the liquidators and
their news paper Luch. In the spring of 1913 Pravda was
reorganised, its contents greatly improved and its size increased in
accordance with Lenin's instructions. Congratulating the editors and staff
on the improvement of content, Lenin set the task of fighting
“to win 100,000 readers.... The great (and sole)
danger for Pravda now is the loss of the broad reader
ship, loss of a position to fight for it” (p. 350).
A prominent place is occupied by documents written in connection with the
preparations for and the convocation of many Party conferences and
meetings. These include letters in which Lenin gives his assessment of the
Cracow and
Poronin meetings of the C.C. with Party functionaries, the Fourth Congress
of the Latvian Social-Democrats, etc. Speaking of the Cracow meeting held
in January 1913, Lenin wrote: “It's going wonderfully. It will be no
less significant than the 1912 January Conference. There will be
resolutions on all important issues, unity
included” (p. 327).
The volume includes many letters written to Inessa Armand in connection
with the convocation of the Brussels “unity” conference by the
International Socialist Bureau in July 1914. Guided by Lenin's
instructions, the delegation of the Central Committee exposed at this
conference the harm caused by liquidationism and called for unity of the
working-class movement from below. The liquidators did not achieve their
ends, the support given them by international opportunism did not yield
the results they had expected. “The liquidators' last card
is the help of the foreign organisations, but that card, too, will be
beaten," Lenin wrote (p. 424).
The large number of letters written during the imperialist world war
(1914-17) afford an idea of the tremendous theoretical and practical work
Lenin accomplished in elaborating and propagating the Bolshevik tactics of
struggle against imperialist war, and of his uncompromising attitude
towards social-chauvinism and Kautskyism. The letters to V. A. Karpinsky,
Sophia Ravich, G. L. Shklovsky, M. N. Pokrovsky and others throw light on
the circumstances in which some of Lenin's most important articles and
books were written and published—Socialism and War, Imperialism,
the Highest Stage of Capitalism, etc. The letters are a complement to
such works as “The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to
Self-Determination”, “The Junius Pamphlet”, “A
Caricature of Marxism and Imperialist Economism” and others, and
offer a model of the creative approach to the revolutionary theory of
Marxism. In them Lenin, through profound study and generalisation of the
historical experience of proletarian class struggle, outlines the tasks of
international Social Democracy and the working-class movement at the time
of the imperialist world war, and develops the fundamental Marxist
propositions concerning just and unjust wars and
the defence of the country. The volume also contains letters
criticising the anti-Marxist views of N. I. Bukharin,
G. L. Pyatakov and Yevgenia Bosh. Firmly and consistently
upholding the basic principles of Marxism, Lenin combated at
the same time the conciliatory position taken by
G. Y. Zinoviev.
The letters to V. A. Karpinsky reflect the tremendous practical work done
by Lenin in connection with the resumption of publication of
Sotsial-Demokrat, the Central Organ of the Party. Transporting
the paper to Russia, arrangements with contributors and many other things
all the way to minor details (type and paper) claimed his attention. For
instance, in a letter to Karpinsky dated November 22, 1914, he wrote:
“Write and let us know for how many issues you have thin
paper. If there is plenty (we shall probably get some more from Paris) and
if it is not too bad for local use, we shall increase the % of thin
paper” (p. 436).
Despite the difficulty of establishing contacts with the local Party
organisations, the Central Committee headed by Lenin arranged for the
circulation in Russia of Bolshevik literature exposing the imperialist
character of the war, educating the workers, soldiers and peasants
politically and teaching them how to combat the war, and calling on them
to rise against their own exploiters. The Central Committee maintained
contact with the Party organisations in Russia through Stockholm and later
through Oslo, where A. G. Shlyapnikov was representative of the Central
Committee and the Petersburg Committee at the time. Some of the letters to
Shlyapnikov may therefore be regarded as letters to the Central Committee
Bureau in Russia. Contact with Russia was maintained also through
M. M. Litvinov, Alexandra Kollontai, and others.
Lenin attached prime importance to rallying the forces of the Left
Social-Democrats in the various countries of Europe and America. Included
in the present volume are his letters to Left Social-Democrats in Holland,
France, Belgium, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway and other countries. He
arranged for the circulation of the Central Organ, Bolshevik publications,
resolutions of the Conference of R.S.D.L.P. Groups Abroad, etc., among the
revolutionary
Social-Democrats of many countries, and established personal contacts with
them. In a letter to H. Gorter he supported the idea of founding an
international journal of the Left Social-Democrats to counter the
social-chauvinists' mean way of “defending opportunism of the worst
brand by means of sophisms” (p. 453). In a letter to David Wijnkoop
Lenin pointed out: “What we need is not the solemn declarations of
leaders ... but a consistent revolutionary declaration of principles to
help the workers find the correct path” (p. 478).
From the beginning of the war, when the Second Inter national collapsed
ideologically and politically and in effect broke up, with the various
Social-Democratic parties at loggerheads with one another, Lenin advocated
the establishment of a Third International to include the Left, genuinely
revolutionary internationalists. Writing to G. Y. Zinoviev, he said:
“I am sending Wijnkoop's letter. Return it immediately....
I shall snatch at this 'little kernel' of a Left International
with both hands. We must work as hard as we can to get closer
together with them” (p. 461).
A number of letters deal with the preparations for the Zimmerwald and
Kienthal International Socialist Conferences and also the popularisation
of their decisions. In the course of the preparatory work for the Kienthal
Conference Lenin advised the Dutch internationalists to contact the
minority of the British Socialist Party and urge them to send
“either a representative, or at least a declaration. If, as a result
of this conference, we receive ... a Left Marxist international
declaration of principles, it will be a very useful thing” (p. 482).
Of particular interest are the letters written in early 1917 and in the
last days spent by Lenin abroad, when it became known that the February
bourgeois-democratic revolution had been successful. They constitute a
valuable addition to other Lenin documents containing an analysis of the
revolutionary developments in Russia and the new tasks he set before the
proletarian party, the workers, peas ants and soldiers. Several letters
relate to arrangements for Lenin's return, together with other Party
workers, from Switzerland to Russia.
The volume closes with a note to Margarita Fofanova written late at night on October 24 (November 6), 1917: “I am going where you did not want me to go. Good-bye. Ilyich” (p. 638). Lenin had left for the Smolny, the headquarters of the revolution, to lead the October armed uprising.
Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the C.C., C.P.S.U.
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