Written: Written on August 3, 1918
Published:
First published in 1959 in Lenin Miscellany XXXVI.
Sent to Berlin.
Printed from the original.
Source:
Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
1975,
Moscow,
Volume 44,
page 123a.
Translated: Clemens Dutt
Transcription\Markup:
R. Cymbala
Public Domain:
Lenin Internet Archive.
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• README
3/VIII.
Comrade Joffe
Everything you write in your recent letters is the height of absurdity.
To pursue the “former” policy of not breaking with the Entente after the Onega events is ludicrous.[1] You can’t restore chastity to a dame with a baby.
It is also absurd to apply the term intervention or aid to the fact that we are continuing to manoeuvre, allowing the Germans to take what the Entente has already taken, thereby making more difficult and delaying the Anglo-American-Japanese throttling of Russia.
Without knowing the facts and without reflecting on them, you have fallen into error with the memorandum and the rest. If you wish to insist on it, hand in your resignation to the C.C. Until you do so, until the C.C. has accepted your resignation, until a substitute has been sent to you, and until his arrival, you, of course, as a Party member (as you yourself write) will do your duty.
Gruss,
Lenin
[1] On July 31, 1918, the Entente interventionists landed troops in Onega and seized the town.
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