V. I.

Lenin

90

To:   YELENA STASOVA, F. V. LENGNIK, AND OTHERS [1]

14/X.

Our very dear Friends, We sent you some three weeks ago a letter through
Irina . [2]
We heartily endorse your plan. Write if you have a chance. Bonch and
Lenin have undertaken the publishing end. Down with Bonapartism! ,
Our Misunderstandings and To the Party have already appeared, and On the New Road , The Fight for a Congress
and On Socialism are coming out shortly. According to our
estimates 14 committees, Ii of them with full voting rights, have already
declared for the congress. All the attempts of the C.O., the C.C. and the
Council to hold up the agitation for the congress have proved
fruitless. The C.C. saw that the Majority also has to be reckoned with and
is evidently ready to make concessions.

With the Minority too they haven’t been able to achieve full unity. In a
word, they have got into a mess.

Formerly the C.O. played the committees off against the C.C. and baited
the C.C., now it is playing the periphery off against the committees and
trying to prove that the opinion of the committees is not the opinion of
the Party, and that strictly speaking there is no Party. They have done
everything they could to split the Party and now they shout that the Party
does not exist.

The position of the C.C. has untied our hands and life now is far
easier than before. Of course there is some bad news, for example,
Brodyaga has gone with the Minority, so has Samsonov, but that can’t
be helped. We shall go on working and upholding our views, and time will
tell. A new pamphlet by Trotsky came out recently, under the editorship of
Iskra , as was announced. This makes it the “Credo” as it were of
the new Iskra . The pamphlet is a pack of brazen lies, a distortion
of the facts. And this is done under the editor ship of the C.O. The work
of the Iskra group is vilified in every way, the Economists, it is
alleged, did far more, the Iskra group displayed no initiative,
they gave no thought to the proletariat, were more concerned with the
bourgeois intelligentsia, introduced a deadly bureaucracy
everywhere—their work was reduced to carrying out the programme of the
famous “Credo”. The Second Congress was, in his words, a reactionary
attempt to consolidate sectarian methods of organisation, etc. The pamphlet
is a slap in the face both for the present Editorial Board of the C.O. and
for all Party workers. Reading a pamphlet of this kind you can see clearly
that the “Minority” has indulged in so much lying and falsehood that it
will be incapable of producing anything viable, and one wants to fight,
here there is some thing worth fighting for.

Kol’s wife is well, she is in Yekaterinoslav.

Warm greetings to all of you.

Starick & Co.

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Notes:
[1]
Written by Krupskaya on Lenin’s instructions.— Ed .

[2]
See present volume, Document 88.— Ed .