V. I.

Lenin

25

To:   MAXIM GORKY

Dear Al. M., It seems a long time since we have had any word from
you. How are you getting on? Are you well?

I received today No. 187 of Pravda with the subscriptions for 1913. The paper is having a hard passage: since
the summer decline in circulation, the rise has been very
slow, and a deficit remains. They have even temporarily
stopped payment to two permanent contributors, which has
made our position exceptionally difficult.

We propose to develop intensive agitation among the workers for subscriptions , and to use the money collected to
strengthen the paper and expand it, because since the opening
of the Duma there has been no room at all for articles.

I hope you too will take part in the agitation for subscriptions, in order to help in “rescuing” the paper. In
what form? If you have a tale or something suitable, the
announcement of it will make very good agitation. If not,
send them a promise to provide one in the near future, and particularly in 1913. Finally, a few simple lines, in a
letter to the workers from you, about the importance of
supporting the workers’ paper actively (by subscriptions,
sales, collections), would also be splendid agitation.

Please drop a line about one or the other—direct to the
editor of Pravda (2 Yamskaya, St. Petersburg) or to me here (Ulijanow, 47, Lubomirskiego, Krakau).

Probably there will be no war, and we shall remain here
for the time being, “taking advantage” of the desperate
hatred of the Poles towards tsarism.

The liquidators are now carrying on an attack against revolutionary strikes! They’ve sunk to that. There is talk
of a strike and demonstration for January 9.

Among the workers’ deputies, for the first time in the three Dumas (2nd, 3rd, 4th), all six deputies from the chief
gubernias are on the side of the Party. Things are difficult,
but still the cause is going ahead.

Have you seen the “defence” of Ropshin in
Zavety , [1] in the name of “freedom of thought and criticism” (in reply
to the letter to the editor from Natanson and Co.)? That
is worse than any liquidationism—renegacy which is muddled, cowardly, evasive and nonetheless systematic!

We are swimming “against the stream”.... One has now to fight for revolutionary agitation among the masses
against very many “would-be revolutionaries”.... Among the mass of the workers there is unquestionably a
revolutionary mood, but the new democratic intelligentsia (
including the workers’ intelligentsia) with a revolutionary
ideology is growing up slowly, lagging behind, can’t yet
catch up.

Very warm greetings!

Write me a couple of words.

Yours, Lenin

P.S. Greetings to M. F.! She has somehow fallen quite, quite silent....

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Notes:
[1]
Zavety (Behests)—legal literary-political monthly with a
Socialist-Revolutionary orientation; appeared in St. Petersburg, April
1912 to July 1914.