Published:
First published in 1926 in Lenin Miscellany V.
Sent from Geneva to St. Petersburg.
Printed from the original.
Source:
Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
[1977],
Moscow,
Volume 43,
pages 163b-164.
Translated: Martin Parker and Bernard Isaacs
Transcription\Markup:
R. Cymbala
Public Domain:
Lenin Internet Archive
(2005).
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30.IX. 05
Dear Friends,
1) I am sending you a draft contract with Malykh for approval by the entire C.C.[1] I advise approval, since there are a lot of people here who have nothing else to live on, and the Party cannot support them (including editors and contributors of Proletary). This is a serious question, which I would beg you not to decide offhand; otherwise there is liable to be a desperate crisis.
2) I advise raising the 50 per cent to 100 per cent. Malykh ought to agree.
3) Be sure to get an undertaking from her at once to submit to ideological guidance (and not only control) by a person to be agreed upon between herself and the C.C. This is quite possible, she will agree; this point is enormously important in principle, and its practical significance for the future will also be very great.
4) You are placing me and especially yourselves in an impossible position vis-à-vis the International Bureau by not appointing a representative to the conference and not sending C.C. members here as promised.[2] For heavens sake can’t you see that in this way you are setting the entire international Social-Democracy against you. I already have an inquiry from the International Bureau concerning the strange silence of the C.C. (I replied that you agree in principle to a conference without arbitration, that you will soon send delegates, and that talks are now going on in Russia between the Organising Commission and the C.C.).
It is necessary to give the International Bureau a precise and clear official answer, otherwise you will seriously compromise yourselves, it will look as if you were evading the issue.[3]
5) I have lost all hope of your coming. Why didn’t you write a word about the end of Sysoika? Let me know whether you have definitely given up the idea of coming. In general there has been no news from you about anyone for over a month.
6) As regards Plekhanov, I can pass on some local rumours for your information. He is obviously angry with us for having exposed him in the eyes of the International Bureau, he swears like a stevedore in No. 2 of Dnevnik Sotsial-Demokrata.[4] There is talk of his putting out his own paper, or returning to Iskra. The conclusion: he should be regarded with growing distrust.
Best regards. Let me have at least some sort of a reply.
Yours,
Lenin
[1] The contract with the publishing firm of Maria Malykh (Edelman) was drawn up after the latter had approached Lenin with an offer to publish a number of works by him and other Bolshevik writers.
The contract never materialised since, as P. P. Rumyantsev informed Lenin in his reply to the present letter, the C.C., R.S.D.L.P. had simultaneously begun negotiating in St. Petersburg with the Znaniye Publishers, founded by K. P. Pyatnitsky and Maxim Gorky. In his reply, Rumyantsev asked Lenin for permission to sign the contract with Znaniye. On October 2 (15) Lenin cabled his agreement (see Document 125). The contract with Znaniye was signed on October 21 (8), 1905, by L. B. Krasin and P. P. Rumyantsev.
[2] A reference to a conference proposed by the International Socialist Bureau with a view to uniting the R.S.D.L.P. (see Lenin’s letter to the I.S.B. of September 16, 1905, present edition, Vol. 9, p. 252).
[3] The C.C., R.S.D.L.P. informed Lenin in a letter dated October 3 (16), 1905, that it had appointed as its representatives at the conference Lenin, F. V. Lengnik and P. P. Rumyantsev. Lenin informed the I.S.B. of this on October 14 (27), 1905 (see present edition, Vol. 9, pp. 390–91).
[4] Dnevnik Sotsial-Demokrata (Diary of a Social-Democrat) was published in Geneva by G. V. Plekhanov at irregular and lengthy intervals from March 1905 to April 1912, 16 issues in all. Dnevnik resumed publication in Petrograd in 1916, but only one issue came out.
No. 2 of the publication (August 1905) carried an article by Plekhanov, “Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends (A Letter to the Editors of Proletary)”, intended as a reply to Lenin’s “On the Provisional Revolutionary Government. Article One. Plekhanov’s Reference to History” (see present edition, Vol. 8, pp. 463–74) and accusing Lenin and the Bolsheviks of Blanquism.
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