Written: Written 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,
[1977],
Moscow,
Volume 43,
pages 437b-438a.
Translated: Martin Parker and Bernard Isaacs
Transcription\Markup:
R. Cymbala
Public Domain:
Lenin Internet Archive
(2005).
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25/XI.
Dear Friend,
Yesterday evening we read about the arrest of 11 people (including 5 members of the R.S.D.L. Duma group)[1] near St. Petersburg and today we sent a telegram to Branting for you to find out (le cas échéant through the Finns) whether the 5 members of the Duma group have been arrested or not.
It’s a bad job if they have!
All the more inadmissible is your departure for Denmark. Generally, I strongly protest against such a removal. Now of all times you have to be in Stockholm in order to organise contacts more properly, frequently and widely. This is a difficult job that requires an experienced man, knowing at least one foreign language. It simply cannot be shuffled off onto “somebody”.
If you are molested (by the police) in Stockholm, you should hide yourself in a village outside Stockholm (this is easy, they have telephones everywhere). I think Kollontai, too, could easily come to Stockholm soon incognito or to some small place outside town.
We shall soon be putting out No. 34 of the C.O., then No. 35.
Please answer quickly. We receive all your letters. The liquidators’ document (their reply to Vandervelde)[2] has also been received. Thanks.
All the very best. Awaiting your news,
Yours,
Lenin
[1] This refers to the arrest of the Bolsheviks who attended the conference at Ozerki, near Petrograd, among whom were members of the R.S.D.L.P. group in the Fourth Duma.
The conference was held from November 2 to 4 (15–17), 1914, and was attended, apart from the Bolshevik Duma deputies, by delegates from the Bolshevik organisations of Petrograd, Ivanovo-Voznesensk, Kharkov and Riga.
All the delegates were arrested except the Bolshevik deputies, who enjoyed parliamentary immunity. But they too were arrested a couple of days later, tried and exiled for life to Eastern Siberia (see Lenin’s article “What Has Been Revealed by the Trial of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Duma Group”, present edition, Vol. 21, pp. 171–77).
[2] The answer given by the St. Petersburg liquidators (P. P. Maslov, A. N. Potresov, N. Cherevanin [F. A. Lipkin] and others) to Vandervelde’s telegram appealing to the Russian Social-Democrats not to oppose the war. In their reply the liquidators justified the Belgian, French and British socialists in joining the bourgeois governments, fully approved the stand adopted by the social-chauvinists and declared that in their activities in Russia they were not opposing the war. The liquidators’ reply was published in No. 34 of Sotsial-Demokrat with a note from the editors.
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