Written: Written after August 19, 1915
Published:
First published in 1930 in Lenin Miscellany XIV.
Sent from Sörenberg to Lausanne.
Printed from the original.
Source:
Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
1971,
Moscow,
Volume 36,
page 345.
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.
Dear Comrade,
I wrote to you the other day about Golay. Things are now going forward from the other side, so to speak. It is not a preliminary conference, but an international conference of the Left that has been set for Sept. 5. Merrheim will be there from Paris (all this is entre nous, of course). The Nashe Slovo people will attend. Why should not Golay and Naine be there as representatives of Left-wing socialism in French Switzerland (since Grimm, who is much more half-and-half than Naine and Golay, will be attending)?[2] Please, try and see both as soon as possible, have a good heart-to-heart talk with them, and drop me a line in reply, as soon as you can, about the frame of mind of both these Leftist Frenchmen. You realise, of course, that it is anti-chauvinist Frenchmen who would just now—especially in the presence of Merrheim—be of particular importance at the conference.
So, hurry with your reply!
Regards to Rivlin.
Yours,
Lenin
[1] Yelizaveta Rivlina—a member of the Communist Party from 1908; at the time, secretary of the Lausanne Bolshevik group.
[2] Paul Golay did not attend the Zimmerwald Conference. Charles Naine was a delegate from the Swiss Social-Democratic Party and took an active part in its work.
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