Published:
First published in 195G in the Journal Kommunist No. 5.
Sent from Cracow to St. Petersburg.
Printed from the original.
Source:
Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
1971,
Moscow,
Volume 36,
pages 268-269.
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
February 9, 1914
Dear Colleagues,
I have received a letter from the secretary about the unfortunate article which has put the newspaper in peril.[1] It’s a great pity that publicity was given (was it a board decision?) to this unfortunate article in which they contrived to find evidence of ties between the papers....
Having only just come home after a journey “on matters of business”,[2] I looked through all the published issues and have failed to find two articles which I sent (about a month ago!) in reply to F. D. on the subject of unity “(The Liquidators’ Leader on the Liquidators’ Terms of Unity” is the title of the first of these articles).[3] The articles are absolutely essential, especially in view of the new journal Borba,[4] and it is necessary to publish them before it comes out. Yet the articles have not been published, and (as though making a mockery of any collective work) you haven’t written me a single line for a whole month about their fate! ((If they are too long, which however is improbable, I would have sent them to Prosveshcheniye.))
Really, I quite fail to understand this way of doing business! How can you treat contributors—and colleagues—in this manner?
Please, reply!
With greetings,
V. I.
P.S. Please send me
Proletarskaya Pravda No. 11 (29)
Put Pravdy
No. 2[5]
Novaya Rabochaya Gazeta No. 8 (126).
P.S. Do you happen to have a file of the journal Mysl,[6] or any separate issues? Please, send them over.
[1] The secretary of the Pravda editorial board, K. N. Samoilova, informed the C.C., R.S.D.L.P. in her letter of January 25 ( February 7), 1914, of the closure of the newspaper Proletarskaya Pravda (Proletarian Truth), and the possible closure of Put Pravdy (Path of Truth). Her fear arose from the fact that as a result of the publication, in Put Pravdy of January 23, 1914, of the article “That Is Why It Exists...” under the signature of “M. F.” (M. Firin, subsequently exposed as the provocateur M. Y. Chernomazov) which revealed the continuity between the various names of Pravda (Truth), Rabochaya Pravda (Workers’ Truth), Severnaya Pravda (Northern Truth), Pravda Truda (Labour Truth), etc., Petrovsky was prosecuted.
[2] Lenin’s trip to Paris, Brussels, Liege and Leipzig in January and early February 1914 in connection with the work of the Fourth Congress of the Social-Democratic Party of the Latvian Region, and his lectures on the national question.
[3] See present edition, Vol. 20, pp. 95–98.
[4] Borba (Struggle)—a journal published by Trotsky, seven issues of which appeared in St. Petersburg from February 22 (March 7) to July 1914. Trotskyites, liquidators and members of the Vperyod group contributed to the magazine, which under the cover of Trotsky’s “non-factionalism” fought Lenin and the Bolshevik Party.
[5] The Bolshevik Pravda was issued under the name of Proletarskaya Pravda (Proletarian Truth) from December 7 (20), 1913 to January 22 (February 4), 1914, and under the name of Put Pravdy (Path of Truth) from January 22 (February 4) to May 21 (June 3).
[6] Mysl (Thought)—a Bolshevik legal philosophical and socio– economic journal published in Moscow from December 1910 to April 1911. It was started by Lenin to offset and fight the liquidators’ magazines.
| | | | | | |