Several thoughts regarding the letter of 7 c. 6 f. (to Zarin from Lenin). I am writing under the fresh impression of just having read your letter. It infuriated me with its thoughtless bluster, so that I cannot restrain the desire to frankly express my opinion. Please pass my letter on to its author and tell him that there is no need to take offense at a sharp word. This is not for publication, after all.

The letter deserves a reply, in my view, since it especially vividly illuminates one characteristic feature in the mood of many present-day revolutionaries. To wait for instructions, to demand everything from above, from the sidelines, from without, to helplessly throw up one’s hands at the sight of failures experienced locally due to inactivity, complaints and more complaints, the invention of recipes that would cure the evil cheaply and simply.

You won't think them up, gentlemen! If you yourselves are inactive, if you allow splits under your very noses and then oh and ah and complain—no recipes will help. And it is not at all clever to shower us with complaints about it. Do not think that we take offense at your accusations and attacks: we are used to them, devilishly used to them, you know, so that they do not touch us!

"Mass" literature, "dozens of poods"—this battle cry of yours is nothing other than an invented recipe for curing you from without of your own inactivity. Believe me, no such recipes will ever work! If you yourselves are not energetic and resourceful, no one will help you in any way. To clamor: give us this and that, deliver this and that—is quite unreasonable, for you yourselves must take and deliver. It is useless to write to us about this, since we cannot do it from here,

V. I. LENIN

but you can and should do it from yourselves: I am talking about delivering the literature that we have and are publishing.

Some local "activists" (who receive this appellation from their inactivity), seeing only a few issues of "Iskra," not working actively to obtain and distribute it on a mass scale, invent an easy excuse for themselves: this is not it. Give us mass literature, literature for the masses! Chew it for us and put it in our mouths, and then we’ll swallow it, maybe even by ourselves.

How phenomenally absurd these wails seem to one who knows and sees that they, these local "activists," do not know how to arrange the distribution even of what exists. Is it not laughable to read: give us dozens of poods, when you cannot manage to take and distribute even five poods? Do that first, most honorable "dreamers for an hour" (for the first failure throws you off everything, even all your convictions!). Do that, and when you have done it not once but dozens of times, then the publishing will also grow in step with the demands.

I say: grow, for your wails about mass literature (uncritically and senselessly adopted from the SRs and Freedomites and all sorts of bewildered "inactives") are based on forgetting a small... a very small detail, namely: on forgetting that you cannot manage to take and distribute even a hundredth part of the mass literature that we are now publishing. I take one of the latest lists of one of the few (of the miserably, pitifully, shamefully few) of our transports. The Nizhni Novgorod speeches, the Rostov struggle, the pamphlet on strikes, Dikshtein*—I shall limit myself to these. Four, only four little things! How little!!

Yes, very little! Yes, we need four hundred, not four.

"Svoboda" and the SRs publish poods monthly, it is waste paper and charlatanry. Charlatans are always fussy and make more noise, and some naive people take this for energy.

* This is old!—you cry. Yes, All parties that have good popular literature distribute old stuff: Guesde and Lafargue, Bebel, Bracke, Liebknecht, etc., for decades. Do you hear: for decades! And only that popular literature is good, only that is suitable, which serves for decades. For popular literature is a series of textbooks for the people, and textbooks set forth the ABCs, which do not change over half-centuries. The "popular" literature that "captivates" you and which