Written: Written between November 2 and 7, 1913
Published:
First published in Pravda No. 123, May 5, 1932.
Sent from Cracow to St. Petersburg.
Printed from the original.
Source:
Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
[1976],
Moscow,
Volume 35,
pages 115-116.
Translated: Andrew Rothstein
Transcription\Markup:
R. Cymbala
Public Domain:
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• README
To the Editor
For the Editorial Board
Dear Colleagues,
Welcoming the excellent beginning of the struggle by the six deputies for proper respect of the will of the majority of the workers, and the excellent campaign of your paper,[1] I would ask you also to take notice of the following:
If the Seven begin impudently proclaiming themselves the Social-Democratic group (as they have done at, the end of their article in No. 60[2]). then the Six must without fail declare calmly, briefly and firmly: “We are the Social-Democratic Labour group, since we act in keeping with the will of the majority of the class-conscious workers, put it into effect and represent the majority. The seven non-Party deputies have not refuted a single fact, a single figure, out of the mass quoted in our paper and demonstrating this truth. Here is our address; write to us, worker comrades, and do not imagine that we shall insult you by thinking you capable of believing the theory that ‘seven deputies are higher than the Party, higher than the will of the majority of the workers’. Even 77 deputies could not be higher than that will. We are strictly fulfilling it.”
Such a brief declaration is essential. Then you should send a formal statement to Senior Conventus (i.e., to the State Duma). Then the Seven will very rapidly, at, once lose their arrogance: very, very rapidly they will agree to equality (which all of them have recognised in writing). Neither they nor anyone else will have any other way out. Once you have begun a job, you can’t back out. The Six have made a splendid beginning, and their victory is assured, if they carry on correctly—in a week or two their victory is inevitable.
Best greetings and wishes,
V. I.
[1] In October 1913 Za Pravdu published a statement by the Bolshevik deputies (the Six) demanding that the Menshevik section of the Social-Democratic group in the Fourth Duma (the Seven) should recognise the equality of the Six and the Seven to decide all questions in the Social-Democratic group in the Duma. In the same month the Bolshevik deputies announced in Za Pravdu the refusal of the Menshevik liquidators to acknowledge the equality of the Six and the Seven in the group and stated that it was necessary to form an independent Bolshevik workers’ group in the Duma.
[2] Lenin refers to the article “A Threat to the Unity of the Social-Democratic Group”, which was published in the liquidators’ Novaya Rabochaya Gazeta No. 60, October 18, 1913.
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