Written: Written on December 22 or 23, 1912
Published:
First published in 1924 in Lenin Miscellany I.
Sent to Capri.
Printed from the original.
Source:
Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
[1976],
Moscow,
Volume 35,
pages 67-68.
Translated: Andrew Rothstein
Transcription\Markup:
R. Cymbala
Public Domain:
Lenin Internet Archive.
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Dear Al. M.,
It seems a long time since we have had any word from you. How are you getting on? Are you well?
I received today No. 187 of Pravda with the subscriptions for 1913. The paper is having a hard passage: since the summer decline in circulation, the rise has been very slow, and a deficit remains. They have even temporarily stopped payment to two permanent contributors, which has made our position exceptionally difficult.
We propose to develop intensive agitation among the workers for subscriptions, and to use the money collected to strengthen the paper and expand it, because since the opening of the Duma there has been no room at all for articles.
I hope you too will take part in the agitation for subscriptions, in order to help in “rescuing” the paper. In what form? If you have a tale or something suitable, the announcement of it will make very good agitation. If not, send them a promise to provide one in the near future, and particularly in 1913. Finally, a few simple lines, in a letter to the workers from you, about the importance of supporting the workers’ paper actively (by subscriptions, sales, collections), would also be splendid agitation.
Please drop a line about one or the other—direct to the editor of Pravda (2 Yamskaya, St. Petersburg) or to me here (Ulijanow, 47, Lubomirskiego, Krakau).
Probably there will be no war, and we shall remain here for the time being, “taking advantage” of the desperate hatred of the Poles towards tsarism.
The liquidators are now carrying on an attack against revolutionary strikes! They’ve sunk to that. There is talk of a strike and demonstration for January 9.
Among the workers’ deputies, for the first time in the three Dumas (2nd, 3rd, 4th), all six deputies from the chief gubernias are on the side of the Party. Things are difficult, but still the cause is going ahead.
Have you seen the “defence” of Ropshin in Zavety,[1] in the name of “freedom of thought and criticism” (in reply to the letter to the editor from Natanson and Co.)? That is worse than any liquidationism—renegacy which is muddled, cowardly, evasive and nonetheless systematic!
We are swimming “against the stream”.... One has now to fight for revolutionary agitation among the masses against very many “would-be revolutionaries”.... Among the mass of the workers there is unquestionably a revolutionary mood, but the new democratic intelligentsia ( including the workers’ intelligentsia) with a revolutionary ideology is growing up slowly, lagging behind, can’t yet catch up.
Very warm greetings!
Write me a couple of words.
Yours,
Lenin
P.S. Greetings to M. F.! She has somehow fallen quite, quite silent....
[1] Zavety (Behests)—legal literary-political monthly with a Socialist-Revolutionary orientation; appeared in St. Petersburg, April 1912 to July 1914.
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