Written: Written on April 25, 1901
Published:
First published in 1928 in Lenin Miscellany VIII.
Sent from Munich to Berlin.
Printed from the original.
Source:
Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
1971,
Moscow,
Volume 36,
pages 79-80.
Translated: Andrew Rothstein
Transcription\Markup:
R. Cymbala
Public Domain:
Lenin Internet Archive.
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• README
April 25
I have received your letter.
Please send us as soon as you can an exact account of how many suitcases you have received and of what kind, how many have gone and how many remain. We need this to draw up our report and financial accounts. As regards the literature, I have also long been asking you to write how much you received, and what in particular, where you sent it and how it was used.
We have not got the May Day leaflet (N.B.).
The money (100 marks) has already been sent; I repeat my request that you make an extra effort to obtain money in Berlin and elsewhere for the suitcases; you will thereby be giving us the most serious and essential help. How much money of your own have you in hand? What is the average (and actual) monthly turnover?
It would be very important to send Kharkov Days as soon as possible to the South, where they are pressing for it.
I have not quite understood you about the bulletin. (1) Is it the Iskra Promotion Group or the Neutral Group that wants to publish it?[1] (2) Are the bulletins to be the same as before or different? We think that it would be extremely unwise to spend money on bulletins of the old type and, for our part, find it difficult to promise raw material, for the reason that we are working intensively at present on turning Iskra into a monthly paper,[2] and we have neither the time nor the money for copying and sending out material. What we have to think of is not dividing up the available material into bulletins, and weakening both its importance and impression by circulating it in a raw state abroad, but, on the contrary, concentrating all the material in Iskra and accelerating its publication with well-edited and illuminated material. Any other tactics would mean not a struggle against, but a promotion of, the present ideological vacillation and confusion.
It is not surprising that such bulletins were published by the Neutral Group, with its absurd composition and programme, but we should expect more co-operation and rational work from the Iskra Promotion Group. Try and pass on these views to your group (but do not read my letter in full, because I am writing to you personally) and persuade it. Let us know its decision.
Bulletins reviewing the foreign press on Russia are a different matter. They are of course useful. Send us cuttings from the Russian papers. Would it also be possible to supply the Iskra editorial board with Russian journals, after they have been read in Berlin? If it would, let us know what journals we could count on (we have some, but not enough).
[1] The bulletins were to be published by the Iskra promotion group in Berlin, but were not because of a shortage of money and material.
The Neutral Group of Social-Democrats in Berlin was formed round V. A. Bazarov in the autumn of 1900 and set itself the task of healing the split between the supporters of Rabocheye Dyelo and the Emancipation of Labour group after the Second Congress of the Union of Russian Social-Democrats Abroad. Among its members were also M. G. Vecheslov and I. B. Basovsky. According to Bazarov, the group sent its representatives to Geneva in early 1900 to persuade the Iskra and the Sotsial-Demokrat organisations to be reconciled with the Union. The group issued three or four political proclamations and was disbanded in the summer of 1901.
[2] Beginning with issue No. 4 in May 1901, Iskra appeared periodically, once or twice a month.
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