Written: Written in July, not later than 6th, 1912
Published:
First published in 1933 in Lenin Miscellany XXV.
Sent to St. Petersburg.
Printed from the original.
Source:
Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
[1977],
Moscow,
Volume 43,
pages 289-290.
Translated: Martin Parker and Bernard Isaacs
Transcription\Markup:
R. Cymbala
Public Domain:
Lenin Internet Archive
(2005).
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 Colleague,
Received your parcel with files of Pravda and Nevskaya Zvezda.[1] Will you please follow it up with the issues of the old Zvezda which I am missing (you should have a list of these issues). If you do not have the list of missing issues, let me know, and I shall send it at once.
I also received your detailed letter* concerning our co-operation. We shall try to carry out as much as we can of this extremely broad programme. But it must be underscored once again that it is absolutely impossible to carry on without:
(1) money. The office already owes 200 rubles, of which 100 rubles should have been sent by June 1, old style, and 100 rubles by June 15. The debt must be paid without delay and the money sent punctually by the stipulated dates, as agreed;
(2) it is necessary to send new books, works of reference, etc. Without new books it is impossible to carry out even one-tenth of your co-operation programme. In my previous letter I gave you a list of books and would ask you to let me know whether you can send them all.
Further, you ask in your letter “what other newspapers we should send”. The list was sent you with the previous letter and I can only repeat my request that you inform me by telegram: “papers ordered”; otherwise there will be an interruption in the sending of articles.
We are making inquiries about Sinclair’s novel in Leipzig. But that is a translation of the English. Or do you want to translate from the German translation?
At your service,
V. Ulyanov
P.S. As regards the agrarian question in particular, we especially need current publications—government and Zemstvo. Print a notice without fail in the next issue that the paper would like to receive all publications of the kind, promising to publish a list of them as well as reviews of the most important ones.
Vl. Ulijanow. Zwierzyniec. L. 218. Oesterreich.
Krakau.
P.S. The newspaper Nevsky
Golos[6] is also badly needed (we do not have No. 4 or
later issues), as are all trade union
publications. Otherwise the section you want about the struggle between
labour and capital cannot be started.
P.P.S. I cannot but draw your attention to some most unpleasant misprints
in the articles. I have just received (not from the editorial office or
from St. Petersburg at all) Nevskaya Zvezda No. 13. In the article
by a “Non-Liberal
Sceptic”[2]
the word
“ispolzovat”[3]
became
“ispovedovat”[4]
Yet the handwriting of the author of the article is by no means difficult to make out. More, it cannot but be familiar to the compositors and the proof-reader. Lastly, the proof-reader should have easily caught the mistake from the meaning.
It is desirable to see to it that there should be fewer errors of this kind.
Pravda No. 43 has just been received in five copies as promised. But I haven’t got Nos. 41 and 42. Please send five copies of each.
[1] Your letter was postmarked June 18. But we have not yet received Nevskaya Zvezda for June 17!! Please see to it that the papers are mailed regularly. —Lenin
[2] See V. I. Lenin, “Capitalism and ‘Parliament’” (present edition, Vol. 18, pp. 129–31).—Ed.
[5] Pravda (The Truth)—a legal Bolshevik daily; first issue appeared in St. Petersburg on April 22 (May 5), 1912.
The decision to put out a daily mass-circulation workers’ paper was taken at the Sixth (Prague) All-Russia Conference of the R.S.D.L.P.
Lenin gave ideological guidance to Pravda, wrote for it almost daily, advised its editors. He wanted it to be a militant, revolutionary organ.
The paper was constantly hounded by the police, and on July 8 (21), 1914, it was closed down.
Publication was resumed only after the February bourgeois-democratic revolution in 1917. On March 5 (18), 1917, Pravda became the organ of the Central and St. Petersburg Committees of the R.S.D.L.P.
[6] Nevsky Golos (Nova Voice)—a legal Menshevik-liquidationist weekly published in St. Petersburg from May 20 (June 2) to August 31 (September 13), 1912, by D. F. Kostrov in lieu of Zhivoye Dye to (Vital Cause). All told nine issues came out.
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