V. I. Lenin

Source: ru:LS/v10;es:MT
Translated: machine translation (DeepSeek) from the Russian; AI-translated.

In his letter to the members of the C.C. in Russia of December 10 (see above, Document 128, pp. 45-48), V. I. Lenin for the first time advanced his proposal to convene an extraordinary congress at the earliest possible date. Not receiving a reply as quickly as the situation demanded, and at the same time knowing the instability of the mood and position of the Russian members of the C.C., G. M. Krzhizhanovsky and V. A. Noskov, Lenin hastened to exert influence on them again and again, first and foremost, to convince them finally of the correctness of his assessment of the situation and of the way out he proposed. The letter from Lenin to G. M. Krzhizhanovsky of December 18, printed below, which was at the same time intended for discussion by all members of the C.C., is a striking example of Leninist strategy.

138.
V. I. LENIN TO G. M. KRZHIZHANOVSKY.

[December 18, 1903. Geneva.]

Dear Friend, We must thoroughly clarify the question on which we apparently differ, and I earnestly request you to submit this letter of mine for discussion by all members of the C.C. (or the Executive Commission).\(^2\) The difference is as follows: 1) you think that peace with the Martovites is possible (Boris even congratulates us on the peace! It is both laughable and deplorable!), 2) you think that an immediate congress would be an admission of our impotence.\(^3\) I am convinced that you are grievously mistaken on both points. 1) The Martovites are heading for war. Martov at a meeting in Geneva openly shouted that they are a force. In the newspaper they are baiting us and meanly substituting one question for another, covering up their intrigues with cries about bureaucratism directed at you.\(^4\) Martov continues to shout right and left about the complete unfitness of the C.C. In a word, it is naive and directly impermissible to doubt that the Martovites aim to seize the C.C. as well by the same intrigues, boycott and scandal. The struggle against them on this ground is beyond our strength, for the C.O. is a terrible weapon and our defeat is inevitable, especially in view of the arrests. By letting time slip by, you are heading for certain and complete defeat of the entire majority; you are silently swallowing the foreign (League) slaps in the face to the C.C.\(^5\) and inviting new ones. 2) The congress will prove our strength, will prove that we do not merely in words but in deeds allow no clique of foreign scandal-mongers to command the entire movement. The congress is needed precisely now, when there is a slogan: struggle against disorganisation. Only this slogan justifies the congress and fully justifies it in the eyes of the whole of Russia. By letting time slip by, you lose this slogan, you prove your impotent, passive submission to the Martovites. To dream of strengthening one's position by positive work while the C.O. is baiting us, while the Martovites are boycotting and agitating, is simply ridiculous. It means slowly ruining ourselves in an inglorious struggle with intriguers, who will later say (and are already saying): look how incapable this C.C. is! I repeat: do not delude yourselves with illusions. Either you dictate peace to the Martovites at the congress, or you will be ignominiously ousted or replaced at the first arrest. Now the congress has a purpose: to put an end to the impossible disorganisation, to remove the League,\(^6\) which makes a mockery of every C.C., to take the Council firmly into our own hands and to put the C.O. in order. How to put it in order?—in the worst case, even retaining the five (or restoring the six);\(^7\) but this worst case is improbable if we have a large majority. Then we shall either finally defeat the Martovites (Plekhanov is already talking now about a new *Vademecum*,\(^8\) seeing that there is no peace, and threatening to attack both contending sides. That is just what we need!) or we shall say openly that we have no leading C.O. and turn it into a discussion organ with free articles by the majority and minority signed (better still: remove the polemic with the Martovites into pamphlets, and in *Iskra* fight only against the government and the enemies of Social-Democracy).

And so: abandon the naive hope of working peacefully in such an impossible atmosphere. Direct all main forces to touring the committees; let Lan go; immediately secure your committees finally; then launch an attack on the others and... a congress, a congress not later than January!

P.S. If Martov asks Lan about the publication,\(^9\) let Lan by all means pass on the vote to Kol, by all means, otherwise there will be a super-scandal! Martov and Dan say impossible insolent things to Kol at their meetings!

P.P.S. Today, the 18th, another piece of meanness by the Martovites: refusal to print in No. 54 my letter on why I left the editorial board,\(^10\) on the pretext that Hans was against the publication of documents (they have lied themselves into a corner! Hans was against it on condition of peace!). The refusal is accompanied by a heap of nastiness, such as that the C.C. tried to take the C.O. into its own hands, that the negotiations were about restoring the C.C.'s confidence, etc. The tactics are clear: hypocritically to cover up the opposition of the Dans, Martynovs, etc., against the C.C. and quietly to pour filth on the C.C. in the newspaper. I shall under no circumstances leave the vile No. 53 unanswered. Telegraph immediately: 1) do you agree to the printing of my letter\(^11\) outside *Iskra*? Actien* 203; 2) do you agree to direct all forces immediately towards the congress? Actien 204. If the answer to both questions is yes, then Actien 407. If the answer to both is no, then Actien 45.\(^12\)

The day after tomorrow I shall send you my letter on my resignation from the editorial board. If you do not agree to an immediate congress and intend to silently endure the Martovite slaps in the face, I shall probably have to resign altogether from the C.C.

\(^1\) The date is established by the reference in the letter (P.P.S.): "Today, the 18th."
\(^2\) The Executive Commission of the C.C. was created in the second half of October n. st. (shortly after the first co-optation) consisting of three members of the C.C. Its members were G. M. Krzhizhanovsky, L. B. Krasin and F. V. Gusarov. Information about the formation of the Executive Commission of the C.C. is found in letters from G. M. Krzhizhanovsky and L. M. Knipovich abroad. The former, in a letter to F. V. Lengnik and V. I. Lenin of October 13 n. st., speaking of the intention to move the residence of the C.C. from Kiev to Moscow, wrote the following: "Zemlyachka has been instructed to arrange the setting for the C.C.'s new home (Faust) at grandmother's [for moving the C.C. residence to Moscow. Ed.]. We also intend to move Smith**, the horse and the doctor (Mitrosha) there. They will be, so to speak, an executive commission, with a bureau of settled assistants in charge of various departments" (*Lenin Miscellany* VII, Document 54, p. 97). Later, L. M. Knipovich, at that time secretary of the C.C. bureau, in a letter to the editorial board of *Iskra* of November 7 n. st., already wrote about the fact of the formation of the executive commission: "Above all stands the 'conference' of 3 members (Smith, Horse and Mitrofan)" (ibid., Document 92, p. 231).
\(^3\) This passage in V. I. Lenin's letter, where he cites G. M. Krzhizhanovsky's opinions on the possibility of peace with the Martovites and on the inexpediency of an immediate congress as the two main points of disagreement between them at that moment, gives grounds for believing that a conversation between them about an extraordinary congress as the only way out of the situation that had arisen had taken place and that G. M. Krzhizhanovsky had expressed the above-mentioned opinions on this question while still abroad. The possibility of a written expression of opinion by G. M. Krzhizhanovsky on this subject after his departure for Russia is excluded, since no letters from him had been received abroad during that time (there is a direct indication of this in Lenin's letter of December 30, — below, Document 148, p. 115). Therefore, only the first assumption remains valid. Apparently, the discussion between Lenin and Krzhizhanovsky on the possibility of peace with the Martovites and on the congress took place during the discussion of the "unpublished declaration" of the C.C. of November 27, by which the C.C., through the members of the C.C. who were abroad at that moment, reacted at first to Plekhanov's "betrayal", to his co-optation of the Martovites into the editorial board. This unpublished decision (or draft decision) of the C.C. ended as follows: "Therefore the C.C. takes the Party's C.O. into its own hands by revolutionary means and declares that it will strive with all its might to ensure that the will of the Party as a whole, and not the will of the Foreign League nor the betrayal of an individual, determines the future fate of the Party" (*Lenin Miscellany* VII, Document 107, p. 278).
\(^4\) Here Lenin had in mind No. 53 of *Iskra* with Martov's article "Our Congress" and with Plekhanov's reply to Lenin's letter to the editorial board concerning Plekhanov's article: "What Not to Do?" More details about these two articles are given in Note 16 to N. K. Krupskaya's letter to Russia of December 10 (above, Document 127, p. 43) and in Note 3 to V. I. Lenin's letter to the members of the C.C. of the same date (above, Document 128, p. 47). The characterisation given here by Lenin of the position of the "Martovite *Iskra*" was developed in more detail by him in a special note immediately after the appearance of No. 53 of *Iskra* (above, Document 126, pp. 35-37).
\(^5\) Speaking of the "foreign (League) slaps in the face to the C.C.", V. I. Lenin had in mind that up to now the support and organisational base of the opposition had been the Foreign League, at whose congress the Menshevik majority made a whole series of such gestures ("slaps in the face") towards the C.C.: refusal to recognise the C.C.'s right to approve the League's rules, complete disregard of the proposal of the C.C.'s foreign representative to introduce necessary changes into the new League rules, refusal to obey the demand of the C.C. representative to adjourn the congress session after this incident (see *Minutes of the 2nd Regular Congress of the Foreign League of Russian Revolutionary Social-Democracy*, published by the League, 1904, pp. 100-105, 124-125).
\(^6\) "To remove the League" meant to liquidate the improper role of a support base in the opposition's struggle against the C.C. which the League played, due to the presence in its ranks of a Menshevik majority, and to put the League in its proper place as one of the local party organisations, subordinate to the decisions of the congress and the central institutions of the party.
\(^7\) By setting before the extraordinary party congress, among other tasks, also the task of "putting the C.O. in order", "in the worst case... restoring the six", Lenin thereby did not exclude the possibility of his own return to the editorial board of *Iskra*.
\(^8\) G. V. Plekhanov devoted his pamphlet *Vademecum* to the struggle against the "Economists". This work, under the title *Vademecum for the Editorial Board of Rabocheye Dyelo*, published in Geneva in February 1900, was a collection of materials (E. D. Kuskova's "Credo", "Protest of the Russian Social-Democrats", whose author was V. I. Lenin, and a number of letters from leaders of "Economism") which revealed the anti-revolutionary essence of this trend in the Russian Social-Democratic movement. This collection was preceded by an extensive preface by G. V. Plekhanov, which was a critical commentary on the materials of the collection expressing the views of the Economists, and a general assessment both of these views and of the position of *Rabocheye Dyelo* in the ideological struggle between the "politicians"—the Iskra-ists—and the "Economists".
\(^9\) The reference is to the proposal not to publish anything about the negotiations of the C.C. with the opposition, which, according to Yu. O. Martov, G. M. Krzhizhanovsky made to him in a personal conversation before his departure for Russia. More details about this are given in Martov's letter to Lenin of December 17 and in Note 4 to it (above, Document 137, pp. 72 and 73).
\(^10\) Here Lenin speaks of receiving the aforementioned official letter from Martov of December 17 (see Note 9) with a refusal to print the named article by Lenin in *Iskra*.
\(^11\) The article: "Why I Left the Editorial Board of *Iskra*?", which was not published in *Iskra*.
\(^12\) A conventional text for a telegram of four different meanings, proposed here by Lenin, outwardly represented the usual formulas for information about the stock exchange rate of certain securities.

At the very time when *Iskra*, beginning with No. 53, had started an open baiting of Lenin and a concealed campaign against the C.C., when the "scuffle" between it and the foreign department of the C.C., fanned in every way by the editorial board, was flaring up, when, finally, Lenin had begun a decisive campaign within the C.C., among its members, for the convocation of an extraordinary congress—at this very time a very "funny misunderstanding" occurred, in V. I. Lenin's words, with the Russian collegium of the C.C. The C.C., upon G. M. Krzhizhanovsky's return from abroad, on the basis of his information about the results of the negotiations with the opposition and the facts that followed, sent a letter to the committees informing them of the successful conclusion of the negotiations and the establishment of normal relations in the central institutions of the party. This letter reached the foreign department of the C.C. in the second half of December. The archives of the foreign department have preserved two records (copies) of this letter in N. K. Krupskaya's handwriting from two different sources. The fuller and apparently more accurate of these two records reads as follows:
"The following notification of the C.C. was sent out to the committees recently:
'The C.C. of the R.S.D.L.P. is now in a position to inform the committees of the following most important facts of party life, which have resulted from the negotiations of the representatives of the C.C. on the one hand, the representative of the C.O. on the other, and the so-called "minority" on the third.
No. 53 of *Iskra* appears as the C.O. of the R.S.D.L.P., all former contributors to *Iskra* without exception being considered collaborators. The composition of the editorial board has been formed as before, except for Lenin, who continues to collaborate but resigned from the editorial board as of November 1st of this year. In the same issue of *Iskra* the C.C.'s announcement about the party congress is printed, and from then on the C.O. will carry part of the official communications of the C.C. subject to wide publicity. In accordance with the [formation of the editorial board] of the C.O. on the basis of the party rules, the supreme Council of the Party has been formed, which at its very first session expressed full confidence in the friendly joint work of both central institutions of the party. The conflict of the C.C. with the League has been completely settled by mutual agreement of the parties. An exchange of letters took place between Comrades Martov and Lenin, removing the entire personal side of their conflict.
Informing you of all this, the C.C. believes that this series of facts marks a new era of party relations, leading to a more