Written: Written December 16, 1902
Published:
First published in 1930 in Lenin Miscellany XIII.
Sent from London to Odessa.
Printed from the original.
Source:
Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
[1977],
Moscow,
Volume 43,
pages 94b-95a.
Translated: Martin Parker and Bernard Isaacs
Transcription\Markup:
R. Cymbala
Public Domain:
Lenin Internet Archive
(2005).
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16/XII.
Your letter of November 15 received.
I. It was written in a code unknown to us, but we deciphered it all with the exception of the addresses. (Code only by complete sentences, otherwise the key is very easy to discover.) Repeat the addresses....
III. The committee should he joined without fail and agitation conducted within it to persuade it to affiliate with the all-Russia organisation. At the same time the Southern League should be influenced in the same direction. The existence of two organisations in the same city is not normal,[3] and they should eventually merge and form an Iskra committee; how to do it is, of course, up to you.
(It goes without saying that the merger should take place only if our victory is assured. Otherwise it is better to wait, preserving the organisation which supports Iskra and undermining the other from within.[2] )
IV. Re the Organising Committee.
V. We have been informed that some consignment of Iskra was intercepted in Odessa. What happened?
[1] Identity not established.—Ed.
[2] Insertion in a letter written by Krupskaya. Point III was crossed out later.—Ed.
[3] At the end of 1902 there were two organisations in Odessa—a Social-Democratic committee of an anti-Iskra trend and the Southern Revolutionary League of Social-Democrats, founded in September 1902. In December 1902 the Southern League ceased to exist as an independent organisation. As a result of persistent work on the part of the Iskra supporters in Odessa (Rozalia Zemlyachka, K. 0. Levitsky and others) to combat the Economists and the Borba group, it merged with the Iskra organisation in April 1903. Lenin examines the question in a letter to Lyubov Axelrod dated December 18, 1902 (see this volume, Document 59).
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