296.
18898
V. I. LENIN—TO UNKNOWN [PERSON] FOR A. A. BOG-
DANOV/
21/XI 04 [Geneva]
Dear friend! Please convey immediately to Rakhmetov that he is conducting himself with us in a positively piggish manner. He cannot imagine to what degree everyone here is waiting for him to send definite and precise encouraging reports, and not the telegrams he sends. The public is simply worn out with eternal waiting and uncertainty. It is absolutely impossible that Rakhmetov has nothing to write about: he sees and has seen a mass of people, spoke with Zemlychka, corresponded with Boroda, with Moscow lawyers and men of letters, and so on and so forth and so on. He must keep us *au courant/*—he must transmit connections, communicate new addresses, send correspondence, report on business-like and interesting meetings. Rakhmetov has not sent us a single new connection! This is monstrous. Not a single piece of correspondence, not a single report about the group of men of letters in Moscow. After all, if Rakhmetov were to fall through tomorrow, we could not use anything, as if he had never lived!! This is a disgrace; he could write about everything and anything without the slightest danger, and yet he only hints at some sort of young forces, and so on. ^What is known about Bazarov, Fritsche, Suvorov and others? He must spend no less than once a week (by God this is not much) 2–4 hours on a letter of 10–15 pages; otherwise, truly, all connection is factually severed. Rakhmetov and his boundless plans transform themselves into boundless fiction, and the local public simply flees in horror, concluding in terror that there is no majority at all and that the majority will have nothing. The tactic of the minority has revealed itself completely, in its new form: complete ignoring and silencing of the literature of the majority and the existence of the majority, elimination of polemics from *Delo*[*] and presumptuous strutting about positive work. ^Recently the redaction of *Delo* issued in print, but "only for party members" a letter to party organizations about the plan of participation of s.d. in the zemstvo campaign: incredible presumptuous strutting about incredible vulgarities. There has come out here

* Printed from the draft. Ed.
** —*au courant*, in the know. Ed.