...who would put our affairs in order, teach the Germans and so forth. As soon as everything becomes finally clear, I shall write or telegraph him immediately. Your article "Once Again etc." I should very much like to have as soon as possible, given the possibility that it may have to be sent directly to the printer.

Against the "Workers' Thought" — properly speaking, only against the article "Our Reality" in the "Separate Supplement" — I had written an article "Backward Tendency in Russian Social Democracy"* a year ago; now they have sent it to me here, and I am thinking of reworking it for the journal with an addition against the "Workers' Cause."

I do not quite understand which "latest issue" of the "Workers' Thought" you are referring to? The latest issue of the newspaper was No. 8 — ("from the 5th page" new editorial board), where among other things was printed a renunciation of the famous parallels at the end of the article on Chernyshevsky, published in the "Separate Supplement." Is this what you have in mind?

The note "Where have they gotten to?"67 I would consider useful, although as to the "militancy" of the "Workers' Thought" I now have doubts: they nonetheless want to take certain steps "toward us" (passez moi le mot**) and one should try to consider them capable of improvement***. But an attack, of course, should still be mounted: without an attack they are incorrigible. I corresponded recently with my old comrade from the Union68, Vetrinskaya, and told her that I concur with Alexei's words: "you and I shall have to struggle." "Struggle, if you are not ashamed" — she answered Alexei. I wrote that I was not ashamed at all****.

I was about to converse with you further on the economic tendency and Alexei's views, but it is already very late, and I shall confine myself to a couple of words: the economic tendency was certainly always an error, but this tendency is certainly very young, and the infatuation with "economic" agitation was (and is in some places) both without direction and it was a lawful and inevitable companion

* See Works, 5th ed., vol. 4, pp. 240-273. Ed.

** — forgive me for expressing myself thus. Ed.

*** — capable of reform, not hopeless. Ed.

**** See the present volume, p. 55. Ed.

to a step forward in the situation of our movement that existed in Russia in the late 1880s or early 1890s. This situation was so deadly that you yourself surely cannot imagine it, and one cannot condemn people who, struggling out of this situation, stumbled. A certain narrowness was, for the purposes of this struggle, both necessary and lawful — it was lawful, but when they began to elevate it into a theory and connect it with Bernsteinism, the matter, of course, radically changed. The naturalness of the infatuation with "economic" agitation and service to the "mass" movement, I recall, was recognized even by you in the "New Campaign," written in 1896, when Vilna economism was already a l'ordre du jour*, and the Petersburg variant was being born and taking shape.

I clasp your hand firmly and ask you not to complain of the disorder of this letter.

Your Petroff

Written November 9, 1900

Sent from Munich to Geneva

First published in 1956 in the journal "Communist" No. 16

Printed from the manuscript