Written: Written February 26, 1916
Published:
First published in 1964 in Collected Works, Fifth (Russian) Ed., Vol. 49.
Sent from Zurich to Paris.
Printed from the original.
Source:
Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
[1977],
Moscow,
Volume 43,
pages 510b-511a.
Translated: Martin Parker and Bernard Isaacs
Transcription\Markup:
R. Cymbala
Public Domain:
Lenin Internet Archive
(2005).
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Dear Friend,
I know that you are interested in science, and not in politics. Nevertheless your sympathies, I have no doubt about it, are with France. The split among the German socialists, as one French minister expressed it, is not a matter of indifference to France. Therefore we must help inform the Russians as well as the French about this. Otto Rühle, M.P., plumped in Vorwärts for a split. But it should definitely be added: not “only” Otto Rühle, but also the group of International Socialists of Germany (l’Humanité, too, wrote about it). Please insert this when next writing to Petrograd. And also the following: only Otto Rühle and the International Socialists of Germany declared plainly for a split and against the “marsh”; as to the Internationale group (the German group of whom also Homo wrote in l’Humanité: a beauty of a newspaper!)—this group is wavering: the majority in it are clearly turning back to the marsh. This is obvious from this group’s recent “theses”[1] and from the press statements of Ströbel in Neue Zeit and from the newspaper Die Gleichheit.[2] So don’t forget to add this! Science is everything to you, but a little sympathy towards France, a lot of sympathy, I should say, you undoubtedly have!
Salutations cordiales!
Lenin
[1] The theses “On the Tasks of International Social-Democracy” were drafted by Rosa Luxemburg and adopted at the conference of German Lefts held in January 1916 in Berlin. See Lenin’s article “The Junius Pamphlet” (present edition, Vol. 22, pp. 305–19).
[2] Die Gleichheit—a Social-Democratic fortnightly journal, mouth piece of the women workers’ movement in Germany, and eventually of the international women’s movement; appeared in Stuttgart from 1890 to 1925. From 1892 to 1917 it was edited by Clara
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