Dear Comrade!

I received your letter and the English enclosure.59

Thank you very much!

I am sending you both items you wrote about. Let me know—if you translate and send them on—what becomes of them.

They say there was an editorial in *Hamburger Echo* "Über unseren Verrat an der Internationale"* and it says there that the Germans (that is, the German opportunist scoundrels)—everything and in their place Plekhanov, Maslov, and Tsereteli.60

Is that true? And what do you think about it?

Greetings and best wishes.

V. Lenin

P.S. Ask Alexander to make the acquaintance of Kobetzky, Kobezky. Kapelwej. 51 4. Kjobenhavn VI, and get from him my letter to him (Alexander).

It is useless to put forward a nice program of pious wishes for peace if one does not at the same time, and in the first place, preach the illegal organization and the civil war of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie.

N. Lenin

The European war has rendered international socialism the great service of clearly exposing

*—"On Our Betrayal of the Internationale." Ed.

the entire degree of rottenness, baseness, and vileness of opportunism, thereby giving a magnificent impetus to the cleansing of the workers' movement from the filth accumulated during decades of peacetime.

N. Lenin

Written before December 16, 1914

Sent from Bern to Copenhagen

First published in 1924 in *Lenin Miscellany II*

Printed from the manuscript