Written: Written at the end of November or the beginning of December 1915
Published:
First published in 1929 in Lenin Miscellany XI.
Sent from Berne to Geneva.
Printed from the original.
Source:
Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
1971,
Moscow,
Volume 36,
page 361.
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 Friends,
I am sending you leaflet No. 1.[1]
Help us to distribute it.
The address of the publisher is on the leaflet (rub it off after making a copy). Tell the Frenchmen, Guilbeaux and others, about it.
How is the Swiss referendum going? Is there any response (in Geneva) to the struggle between the opponents and supporters of “defence of the fatherland”?[2]
Best regards and wishes,
Yours,
Lenin
[1] This may be a reference to Internationale Flugblätter No. 1, issued in November 1915, and carrying F. Platten’s Zurich address. On the strength of this, Lenin’s letter in the Fourth Edition of his Sobraniya Sochineny (Collected Works) is dated “late November-early December 1915”.
But it is also possible that Lenin was referring to the leaflet Gegen die Lüge der Vaterlandsverteidigung (Against the Lies of Defence of the Fatherland) No. 1, which was issued in February 1917, and signed by “a group of Zimmerwald Left-wingers in Switzerland”. This leaflet bears no publisher’s address, which warrants the assumption that Lenin’s letter might have been written in February 1917.
[2] A possible reference to the struggle between the Left and the Centrists at the Aarau Congress of the Social-Democratic Party of Switzerland on November 20–21, 1915, or the referendum on the calling of an extraordinary Party congress announced by the Swiss Left-wing Social-Democrats in January 1917.
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