Written: Written December 16, 1913
Published:
First published in part in 1961 in Istorichesky Arkhiv No. 2.
Published in full in 1964 in Collected Works, Fifth (Russian) Ed., Vol. 48.
Sent from Cracow to St. Petersburg.
Printed from the original.
Source:
Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
[1977],
Moscow,
Volume 43,
page 366.
Translated: Martin Parker and Bernard Isaacs
Transcription\Markup:
R. Cymbala
Public Domain:
Lenin Internet Archive
(2005).
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...[1] Our representative’s telegram, which I received yesterday, says on this question only: “unification entrust ed to executive.”
And so the question is not clear.[3]
Just in case, and subject to the extremely important reservation that there should be no haste in publishing it, I suggest the following text of an editorial statement (seeing that the “storm” has already been raised in the dirty tea-cup of the Burenin-Gamma newspaper).
The decision of the International Socialist Bureau to call a conference of Russia’s Social-Democrats—those working in Russia, of course, and not the shadows of them abroad—fully meets with our approval. Such a conference will help most clearly to expose the treachery to the Party on the part of the liquidator gentry and the Burenin methods of fellows like Gamma, of whom it is high time that Social-Democracy rid itself.
Tomorrow (or the day after, at the latest) I shall probably receive a detailed report from London. I shall then write to you immediately again, and if it is necessary not to publish the statement I am sending you (i.e., the one on the preceding page 3[2] ) I shall wire: hold it up. This will mean, consequently, that page 3 is not to he published.
[1] The beginning of the letter is missing.—Ed.
[2] This refers to the previous paragraph.—Ed.
[3] This letter to the editors of Za Pravdu was the second letter written by Lenin on receipt of the first reports concerning the decisions of the December meeting of the International Socialist Bureau of the Second International on the question of unity within the R.S.D.L.P. (see present edition, Vol. 19, pp. 516–18).
The December meeting of the I.S.B., held in London on December 13 and 14 (N.S.), 1918, adopted a resolution on this point moved by Kautsky on behalf of the German delegation. In a speech on December 14 introducing his resolution Kautsky declared that “the old Social-Democratic party in Russia has disappeared”. It was to be restored on the basis of the Russian workers’ urge for unity. In his articles “A Good Resolution and a Bad Speech” and “Kautsky’s Unpardonable Error” Lenin examined the resolution and qualified Kautsky’s speech as monstrous (see present edition, Vol. 19, pp. 528–30 and 546–47).
At a conference held in July 1914 in Brussels in accordance with a decision of the I.S.B., the leaders of the Second International, under the guise of “reconciling” the Bolsheviks with the liquidators, demanded of the Bolsheviks that they cease their criticism of the liquidators. The Bolsheviks refused to bow to this demand and continued their irreconcilable struggle against the liquidators, the enemies of the labour movement.
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