Written: Written on October 10, 1918
Published:
First published in 1965 in Collected Works, Fifth Ed., Vol. 50.
Printed from the original.
Source:
Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
1975,
Moscow,
Volume 44,
pages 152b-153a.
Translated: Clemens Dutt
Transcription\Markup:
R. Cymbala
Public Domain:
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• README
Comrades Chicherin and Karakhan
Regarding the Note to Wilson, I think it should be sent.
Write it in detail, politely, but caustically, saying: in any case we consider it our duty to propose peace—even to governments of capitalists and multimillionaires—in order to try to stop the bloodshed and to open the eyes of the peoples.
The fall of Kazan, Simbirsk, Syzran and Samara has obviously exploded such-and-such rumours....
Do the capitalists want some of the forests in the north, part of Siberia, interest on 17 thousand millions?[2] If so, then surely they won’t make a secret of it. We propose to you: state outright, how much[1] ? Regarding the Brest peace—Germany will agree to withdraw her troops. What’s the matter then? Do you want to replace the German troops with your own troops?
And so on.
I suggest that you immediately draft such a Note, and we shall discuss it together.[3]
[[
}} N.B.
Pravda wanted to publish my article against Kautsky
morning. Did you receive from Sverdlov my note
asking for 12 copies to be sent to Joffe for Berzin and
Vorovsky, for them to publish as a leaflet? and to have these
dispatched Friday evening?
]]
What news is there from Litvinov?[4]
What has been done about publishing Japanese leaflets?
Greetings,
Yours,
Lenin
P.S. We can talk things over on the telephone.
[1] The words “how much” are in English in the original.—Ed.
[2] Lenin is alluding to the debts of the tsarist and bourgeois Provisional governments to the imperialists of Britain, France, the U.S.A. and other countries. By a decree of the All-Russia Central Executive Committee dated January 21 (February 3), 1918, all foreign loans of the tsarist and Provisional governments were annulled.
[3] The Note to Woodrow Wilson, President of the U.S.A., was dispatched on October 24, 1918 (see Dokumenty vneshnei politiki SSSR, Vol. I, 1957, pp. 531–39).
[4] M. M. Litvinov, Plenipotentiary of the R.S.F.S.R. in Great Britain, was arrested by the British Government as a hostage for Bruce Lockhart, British Vice-Consul in Moscow, who was arrested on September 3, 1918, for counter-revolutionary activities against the Soviet Republic. In October 1918 Litvinov was exchanged for Lockhart and returned to Soviet Russia.
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