Written: Written on November 25, 1914
Published:
First published in 1924 in Lenin Miscellany II.
Sent from Berne to Stockholm.
Printed from the original.
Source:
Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
1971,
Moscow,
Volume 36,
page 310.
Translated: Andrew Rothstein
Transcription\Markup:
R. Cymbala
Public Domain:
Lenin Internet Archive.
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November 25
Dear Friend,
Last night we read of the arrest of 11 people (including 5 members of the R.S.D.L. Duma group[2]) near Petrograd, and we sent a telegram to Branting today to help you ascertain (through the Finns le cas échéant[1] whether the 5 members of the R.S.D.L. Duma group have been arrested.
It will be a bad blow if it is true!
But all the more impermissible in that case will be your departure for Denmark. In any case, I protest energetically against such a departure. This is the time for you to be in Stockholm personally, in order to establish better, more frequent and more extensive contacts. This is a difficult job, it requires an experienced person, with a knowledge of at least one foreign language. It cannot be left just to “anyone” to look after.
If you are pressed (by the police) in Stockholm, you should hide in some village near Stockholm (this is easily done, they have telephones everywhere). I think Kollontai, too, could soon easily come to Stockholm or to some suburban place, incognito.
We shall soon be issuing No. 34 of the C.O., and then No. 35 as well.
Reply as quickly as possible. We have been getting all your letters. We have also received the document[3] of the liquidators (their reply to Vandervelde). Thanks.
All good wishes, and we are awaiting your news.
Yours,
Lenin
[2] The arrest of Bolsheviks attending a conference at Ozerki, near Petrograd, among them members of the R.S.D.L. group in the Fourth Duma.
The conference was held from November 2 to 4 (15 to 17), 1914, and was attended by Bolsheviks from Petrograd, Ivanovo-Voznesensk, Kharkov and Riga.
On November 4 (17), when the conference had just ended, the police, on information of a provocateur, raided the premises. During the search, copies of Lenin’s theses on the war and Sotsial-Demokrat No. 33, which carried the C.C., R.S.D.L.P. manifesto, The War and Russian Social-Democracy, were confiscated from Duma Bolshevik deputies Petrovsky, Badayev and others. All the participants in the conference were arrested, except for the deputies, because of their parliamentary immunity. But they too were arrested two days later, put on trial and exiled for life to Eastern Siberia. Lenin analysed the results of the trial in his article “What Has Been Revealed by the Trial of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Duma Group”, which was published in Sotsial-Demokrat No. 40 on March 29, 1915 (see present edition, Vol. 21, pp. 171–77).
[3] The reply of the Petrograd liquidators (P. P. Maslov, A. N. Potresov, N. Cherevanin [F. A. Lipkin] and others) to E. Vandervelde’s telegram urging the Russian Social-Democrats not to campaign against the war. The liquidators justified the Belgian, French and British socialists who had entered their bourgeois governments, and supported the social-chauvinists, and declared that they, for their part, did not oppose the war. Their reply was published in Sotsial-Demokrat No. 34, with a note from the Editorial Board.
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