Written: Written on February 16, 1922
Published:
First published in 1965 in Collected Works, Fifth (Russian) Ed., Vol. 54.
Printed from the original.
Source:
Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
1976,
Moscow,
Volume 45,
pages 474c-475a.
Translated: Yuri Sdobnikov
Transcription\Markup:
R. Cymbala
Public Domain:
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Please show Stalin and Molotov and send on to Chicherin this reply of mine:
Comrade Chicherin!
You are letting your nerves run away with you. We shall still have time on 22 or 23/11 to discuss the plan of conduct at Genoa.
You and I have both fought against pacifism as a programme for the revolutionary proletarian party. That much is clear. But who has ever denied the use of pacifists by that party to soften up the enemy, the bourgeoisie?[1]
Yours,
Lenin
[1] Written under the text of G. V. Chicherin’s letter of February 15, 1922. With the directives of the R.C.P.(B.) C.C. and Lenin’s instructions in mind concerning the nature of the programme with which the Soviet delegation was to come out at the Genoa Conference (see this volume, Document 623, and also present edition, Vol. 42, pp. 396–98), Chicherin wrote: “I don’t know how we shall manage with the ‘broadest programme’. All my life I have cursed petty-bourgeois illusions, and here is the Politbureau making me invent petty-bourgeois illusions in my old age. None of us knows how to compose such things, we don’t even know on which sources we are to rely. Perhaps you will let us have more detailed directions?” (Central Party Archives of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the C.P.S.U. Central Committee.)
See also Vol. 42, pp. 401–04.
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