V. I.   Lenin

10

To:   P. B. AXELROD

Published: First published in 1925 in Lenin Miscellany III. Sent from Munich to Zurich. Printed from the original.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, [1977], Moscow, Volume 43, pages 48^b-49.
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.
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Dear P. B.,

Forgive me for not replying to you in my letter to Bainova; ill health interfered. But having consulted with V. I. I can see now that the situation is very serious: we need the foreign news items, the first sheet of the paper is already being printed, and the second is ready except for the news items.^[2] The length of the news column should be some   26,000 characters.[1] At a pinch we can throw out something else.

In view of this, please send at once whatever you can. I shall eagerly await your answer.

Address:

   Herrn Georg Rittmeyer.
   Kaiserstra&Bwhatthe;e 53. o.
   München (enclosure: für Meyer).

With best regards,
Yours,
Petroff

You must excuse my insistence. But what else can I do? I hope that you will see to this as you did with the article on Liebknecht.

Notes

[1] Rakovsky’s article of some 10,000 characters included. —Lenin

[2] The publication in question is Iskra (The Spark), the first all-Russia illegal Marxist newspaper, founded by Lenin in 1900. It played the decisive role in the establishment of a revolutionary Marxist party of the working class in Russia.

The editors were Lenin, P. B. Axelrod, Vera Zasulich, Y. 0. Martov, G. V. Plekhanov and A. N. Potresov. At first the Secretary of the Editorial Board was Inna Smidovich-Lehmann, and from the spring of 1901, Nadezhda Krupskaya, who also attended to all of Iskra’s correspondence with Russian Social-Democratic organisations.

After the Second Congress of the Party, beginning with issue No. 52, the newspaper became the mouthpiece of the Mensheviks.