Written: Written in February 1912
Published:
First published in 1925 in Lenin Miscellany III.
Sent from Paris to Capri (Italy).
Printed from the original.
Source:
Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
[1976],
Moscow,
Volume 35,
page 23.
Translated: Andrew Rothstein
Transcription\Markup:
R. Cymbala
Public Domain:
Lenin Internet Archive.
You may freely copy, distribute,
display and perform this work, as well as make derivative and
commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet
Archive” as your source.
• README
Dear A. M.,
We shall shortly send you the resolutions of the Conference.[1] We have finally succeeded—in spite of the liquidationist[2] scoundrels—in reviving the Party and its Central Committee. I hope you will be as glad of this as we are.
Won’t you write a May Day leaflet for us? Or a little leaflet in a similar May Day spirit? Quite a short one, a “heart-warmer”, what do you say? Think of old times, remember 1905, and put down a couple of words, if you have the mind to write. There are two or three illegal printing-presses in Russia, and the Central Committee will republish it, probably, in several tens of thousands of copies. It would be a good thing to gel a revolutionary manifesto like the Tales in Zvezda.[3] T am very, very glad that you are helping Zvezda. We are having a devilish hard job with it—internal and external and financial difficulties are immense—but still we are managing so far.
All the best,
P.S. And Sovremennik[4] has had the sense to die, after all! That was a good deed on its part.
[1] Reference is to the resolutions passed by the Sixth (Prague) All-Russia Conference of the R.S.D.L.P. of 1912. The resolutions and “Announcement” concerning the Conference were published in booklet form in Paris in February 1912 by the C.C. of the R.S.D.L.P.
[2] Liquidationism—an opportunist trend in the R.S.D.L.P. that emerged in the period of reaction following the defeat of the 1905– 07 revolution. The liquidators demanded liquidation of the illegal revolutionary party of the working class and tried to subordinate the working-class movement to bourgeois interests. The Sixth (Prague) All-Russia Conference of the R.S.D.L.P. expelled the liquidators from the Party.
[3] Zvezda (The Star)—legal Bolshevik newspaper (December 1910– May 5, 1912). In 1911 and 1912 it published seven stories by Gorky from his Tales of Italy series.
[4] Sovremennik (The Contemporary)—literary and political monthly published in St. Petersburg from 1911 to 1915. It was a rallying point for Menshevik liquidators, Socialist-Revolutionaries, Popular Socialists and Left-wing liberals.
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