Published:
First published in 1924 in Lenin Miscellany II.
Sent from Berne to Stockholm.
Printed from the original.
Source:
Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
[1976],
Moscow,
Volume 35,
pages 175-176.
Translated: Andrew Rothstein
Transcription\Markup:
R. Cymbala
Public Domain:
Lenin Internet Archive.
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• README
November 28, 1914
Dear Friend,
I have had a telegram from Branting[1] today that “the newspapers confirm the arrest of five deputies”.[2] I fear that now we cannot doubt the fact of the arrest.
This is terrible. The government has evidently decided to have its revenge on the Russian Social-Democratic Labour group, and will stick at nothing. We must be ready for the very worst: falsification of documents, forgeries, planting of “evidence”, false witness, trial behind closed doors, etc., etc.
I think that without such methods the government would not succeed in getting a sentence.
Could you not try to find out the names of the six who have been arrested?
Is K. all right?
At all events, the work of our Party has now become 100 times more difficult. And still we shall carry it on! Pravda has trained up thousands of class-conscious workers out of whom, in spite of all difficulties, a new collective of leaders—the Russian C.C. of the Party—will be formed. It is now particularly important that you should remain in Stockholm (or near Stockholm), and put all your energy into establishing contacts with Petersburg. (Write whether you have received any money as a loan: in my last letter I put in a little note for you about this. If you have not had any and cannot get any, we shall probably be able to send you something; write in as much detail as possible.)
In Zurich a newspaper Otkliki is promised (probably the liquidators+Trotsky) in December. In Paris a daily S.R. Mysl (arch-philistine phrase-making, playing at “ Leftism”)[3] has begun to appear. An abundance of papers, phrases from the intelligentsia, today r-r-revolutionary, tomorrow...? (tomorrow they will make peace with Kautsky, Plekhanov, the liquidationist “patriotic-chauvinist– opportunist intelligentsia” in Russia)....
Among the working class in Russia they never had anything, and have nothing. You cannot trust them in the slightest.
I shake you warmly by the hand, and wish you courage. Times are difficult, but ... we shall get through!
Yours,
Lenin
[1] Branting, Karl Hjalmar (1860–1925)—leader of the Social-Democratic Party of Sweden, and one of the leaders of the Second International. He adopted opportunist positions.
[2] Five Bolshevik deputies in the R.S.D.L.P. group in the Fourth Duma were denounced by an informer and arrested on November 5 (18), 1914, the day after the Bolsheviks’ conference on the war. The tsarist government accused the Bolshevik deputies of “high treason”, and all the deputies were sentenced to deprivation of their rights and exile to Eastern Siberia.
[3] The Mensheviks’ Organising Committee declared its intention of publishing its own paper Otkliki (Echoes), but the project was never realised.
Mysl (Thought)—daily paper of the Socialist-Revolutionaries. Edited by M. Natanson and V. Chernov, it appeared in Paris from November 1914 to March 1915, when it was closed down by the French Government.
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