V. I.

Lenin

109

To:   A CORRESPONDENT OF VPERYOD

Dear Comrade, Your article “What Are We To Do?” is not suitable for
publication. You are creating a non-existent difference. We have so many serious differences that we must refrain from breeding new
ones. Who has spoken, and where, specially about breaking up
anything by force? [1] Nobody, I believe. It was merely conceded as an
inevitable result irrespective of our wishes. We urged people to go to the meetings even if they had to force
their way in in order to propagate our slogans. I grant that the
presentation of ideas was at times clumsy, but to cavil at this would be to
repeat the foul methods of the new Iskra . You of course do not
wish to cavil, that is unquestionable. But you do not in any way prove that
there has been “tactlessness”. And to say that “all tactics should
consist in tact” and the like, why, that’s altogether “off the mark”.

With comradely greetings,

N. Lenin

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Notes:
[1]
A reference to Zemstvo meetings at which the liberal opposition adopted
petitions to the tsar to grant a constitution. Lenin criticised the plan
for the Zemstvo campaign in his article “The Zemstvo Campaign and
Iskra ’s Plan” (see present edition, Vol. 7, pp. 497–518).