V. I. Lenin

Source: ru:PSS/v46; en:CW/CW06;es:MT
Translated: machine translation (DeepSeek) from the Russian; AI-translated.

TO THE MOSCOW COMMITTEE. LETTER OF LENIN

Dear Comrades,

We have received your letter expressing gratitude to the author of *What Is To Be Done?* and the decision to allocate 20% to *Iskra*. In turn, I warmly thank you for your expression of sympathy and solidarity. For an illegal writer this is all the more valuable because he has to work under conditions of unusual isolation from the reader. Every exchange of ideas, every communication about the impression this or that article or pamphlet makes on different strata of readers, is of particularly great importance to us, and we shall be very grateful if we are written to not only about affairs in the narrow sense of the word, not only for the press, but also so that the writer may not feel cut off from the reader.

In No. 22 of *Iskra* we published your decision to allocate 20% to *Iskra*. Your expression of gratitude to Lenin we did not venture to publish, because, in the first place, you set it apart, without mentioning your desire to see it in print. And in the second place, the form of this gratitude did not seem suitable for the press. But please do not think that it is unimportant for us to publish

* See V. I. Lenin, *Collected Works*, Fifth Edition, Vol. 6, pp. 1-192. *Ed.*

statements by committees of their solidarity with certain views. On the contrary, just now, when we are all thinking about the unification of revolutionary Social-Democracy, this is particularly important. It would be very desirable if the Moscow Committee were to give its solidarity with my book the form of a statement which would appear in *Iskra* immediately. It is high time committees came out with an open proclamation of their party position, and broke with the tactic of tacit consent which prevailed in the “third period”. This is a general consideration in favour of an open statement. And in particular, I, for example, have been accused in print (by the *Borba* group in their *Listok* 198) of wanting to turn the *Iskra* Editorial Board into a Russian Central Committee, to “give orders” to “agents”, and so forth. This is a clear distortion of what is said in *What Is To Be Done?*, but I have no desire to print yet again: “you are distorting”. I think that those active workers in Russia who know thoroughly that the “orders” of *Iskra* go no further than advice and the expression of opinion, and who see that the organisational ideas set forth in *What Is To Be Done?* express the urgent need of the day, the sore point of the actual movement, should speak out. I think that these active workers should themselves demand the floor and declare loudly how they regard the question, how the experience of their work leads them to views on organisational tasks that are in solidarity with ours.

We understood your expression of gratitude for *What Is To Be Done?* and could, of course, understand it only in the sense that in this book you found answers to your own questions, that from direct acquaintance with the movement you yourselves derived the conviction of the need for bolder, larger, more united, more centralised work, more closely rallied around a single newspaper centre—a conviction which is also formulated in this book. And if that is so, if you have indeed arrived at such a conviction, it is desirable that the committee should declare this openly and loudly, inviting other committees to work together with it in the same

TO THE EDITORS OF *YUZHNY RABOCHY*. SEPTEMBER 16, 1902

direction, holding to the same “thread”, setting themselves the same immediate organisational and party aims.

We hope, comrades, that you will find it possible to read this letter at a general meeting of the whole Committee and inform us of your decision on the questions indicated. (I may add in parenthesis that the St. Petersburg Committee has also sent us an expression of solidarity and is now thinking of a similar statement.)

Did you have enough copies of *What Is To Be Done?* Did the workers read it and how did they react?

I firmly shake hands with all the comrades and wish them full success.

Yours,
Lenin