Written: Written on November 14, 1920
Published:
Published in full in 1965 in Collected Works, Fifth (Russian) Ed., Vol. 52.
First published in part in 1958 in the magazine Voprosy Istorii KPSS No. 1 (Questions of CPSU History).
Printed from the original.
Source:
Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
1976,
Moscow,
Volume 45,
page 51b.
Translated: Yuri Sdobnikov
Transcription\Markup:
R. Cymbala
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I have accepted almost all of N. K.’s[1] corrections and suggest another one: an addition on combining political and scientific educational work. Zinoviev’s draft can be adopted with these corrections and additions.[2]
[2] A reference to the remarks and additions made by Nadezhda Krupskaya to the draft letter of the R.C.P.(B.) Central Committee, “On the Proletcults” (Proletarian Culture Organisations), whose initial variant had been drawn up by G. Y. Zinoviev and further elaborated on the basis of remarks by the members of the Central Committee and the People’s Commissariat for Education. Krupskaya proposed the following fundamental addition to the letter: “The Proletcult emerged before the October Revolution. It was proclaimed an ‘independent,’ workers’ organisation, unconnected with the Ministry of Public Education under Kerensky. The October Revolution changed the prospect. The Proletcults continued to remain ‘independent’, but now they were ‘independent’ of the Soviet power.” The following was also accepted in her wording: “Instead of helping proletarian youth to engage in serious study and making its communist approach to ail the aspects of life and art more profound, artists and philosophers essentially remote from and hostile to communism, but proclaiming themselves to be truly proletarian, hampered the workers....” And further: “Far from wishing to constrict the initiative of the working-class intelligentsia in the sphere of creative art, the Central Committee wants to create for it a healthier and more normal atmosphere and to enable it to leave its mark on the whole of creative art” (Voprosy Istorii KPSS—Questions of the C.P.S.U. History—1958, No. 1, p. 36). Nadezhda Krupskaya also made various other minor corrections in the draft letter.
Lenin directed and took a personal part in working out the C.C. letter, an important Party document, based on the instructions which he set out in the draft resolution, “On Proletarian Culture” and in the “Draft Decision for the Plenum: of the C.C., R.C.P.(B.) on Proletcult” (see present edition, Vol. 31, pp. 316–17; Vol. 42, p. 226). On December 1, 1920, the letter was published in Pravda.
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