Written: Written after July 23, 1916
Published:
First published in 1964 in Collected Works, Fifth (Russian) Ed., Vol. 49.
Sent from Flums to Hertenstein.
Printed from the original.
Source:
Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
[1977],
Moscow,
Volume 43,
pages 548b-549a.
Translated: Martin Parker and Bernard Isaacs
Transcription\Markup:
R. Cymbala
Public Domain:
Lenin Internet Archive
(2005).
You may freely copy, distribute,
display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and
commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet
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I am sending you MSS. with slips of notes concerning your article (it is shockingly lengthy. Im-pos-sible...) and with cuts in Varin’s (he gave me the right to cut “non-war passages” and generalities. I think it could do with some more cuts).
It looks like it’s going to be something measureless. It’s ghastly. I don’t know what to do. Yet something has still to be written about opportunism (I have 1/2 of it ready), about defeatism and about Trotskyism (including the Duma group+P.S.D.).[2]
Figure out as quickly and accurately as possible how much we already have.
I returned to you the Italian cuttings, as far as I remember. If I didn’t, I must have left them in Zurich, and won’t get them until I return.
Re Bukharin & Co., we should send round to the groups (+Radek??) a confidential letter by the Editorial Board of the C.O. concerning its refusal (for Bukharin & Co. are obviously “retailing” already). Or should we wait a week or so? As for Radek, if he wants to have “our” version, let him send you theirs.
If Ryabovsky is Stark,[3] then we should wait for James’s reply. For there have been suspicions both in regard to Stark and Miron. (Myron, as Kamenev and Malinovsky said, all but confessed to an ugly police affair.)
Salut!
Lenin
P.S. You are right not to trust Bukharin.
Is the enclosed “tab” what you want?[1] Return it.
[1] The meaning of this has not been ascertained.—Ed.
[2] The first part of the letter refers to the articles for Sbornik Sotsial-Demokrata.
Opportunism was criticised by Lenin in his article “Imperialism and the Split in Socialism”; the Duma group and Trotskyism were criticised in two articles: “Efforts to Whitewash Opportunism” and “The Chkheidze Faction and Its Role”, which were published in Sbornik No. 2.
[3] P. Ryabovsky—the pseudonym of L. N. Stark. In his letter of June 12, 1916, to Zinoviev, Ryabovsky wrote that a new publishing house, Volna, had been founded in Petrograd and offered him and Lenin to contribute to the symposiums which it planned to publish.
It afterwards transpired that the pseudonym “Ryabovsky” was used by Stark, who was suspected of being an agent provocateur, and Lenin refused to contribute to these publications.
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