Published:
First published in 1959 in Lenin Miscellany XXXVI.
Printed from the original.
Source:
Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
1976,
Moscow,
Volume 45,
pages 231b-232.
Translated: Yuri Sdobnikov
Transcription\Markup:
R. Cymbala
Public Domain:
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28/VII.1921.
Comrade Zinoviev:
In view of a number of statements made by Zetkin, I regard the conversation I had with her yesterday, before her departure, to be so important that I must inform you of it.
She wants to set Levi two conditions:
1) resign his parliamentary seat;
2) close down his organ (Sowiet[2] or Unser Weg, as I believe it is now called), issuing a statement of loyalty in respect of the decisions of the Third Congress of the Communist International.
Furthermore, she is afraid that it could occur to some friend of Levi’s to publish Rosa Luxemburg’s manuscript against the Bolsheviks (which I think she wrote in prison in 1918). If anyone should do this, she intends to make a statement in the press that she is quite sure such an act is disloyal. She would say that she had known Rosa Luxemburg best of all, and is sure that she herself admitted these views to be erroneous, that she admitted, upon her release from prison, that she had been insufficiently informed.
In addition, Léon Jogiches, Rosa Luxemburg’s closest friend, in a detailed talk with Zetkin, two days before he died, told her about this manuscript of Rosa Luxemburg’s, and about Rosa Luxemburg herself admitting that it was wrong.[3] Zetkin was going to write you about this at my request.
If she has done so, please send me her letter.
Another interesting point, according to her, is that there is a wave of unification of all workers (both S.D.P. and U.S.P.-Leute) in the struggle against Lohnabbau,[1] etc. Of course, Zetkin was quite right in saying that the Communists should back this unification in the struggle against the capitalists. If the “Lefts” should object, they should he made to see reason.
With communist greetings,
Lenin
P.S. Lozovsky has already published the Congress resolutions of the Red International of Trade Unions. Well done!
What about you?? Appoint a person to be responsible for editing, and get Lozovsky to publish the resolutions of the Third Congress of the Communist International.
[1] Wage-cuts.—Ed.
[2] Sowiet—a monthly published in Berlin from 1919 to July 1, 1921, under the editorship of Paul Levi. Following Levi’s expulsion from the United Communist Party of Germany, the journal, from July 1, changed its orientation and was published under the name of Unser Weg. At the end of 1922 it ceased publication.
[3] The draft theses provided that the whole of Soviet policy in Bukhara and Khiva should be implemented only through the plenipotentiary representatives of Russia; the measures taken by the Turkestan Commission were to be agreed with these representatives and, on especially important matters, with the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs.
On August 5, 1921, the Politbureau of the R.C.P.(B.) Central Committee endorsed the draft theses.
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