2. VIII. 05. Dear An. Vas.! Yesterday I sent you a “business” letter and asked you to send me *Iskra* No. 105* and Plekhanov’s L. Feuerbach. Today I feel like conversing outside the bounds of current trifles. The mood among our crowd in Geneva is poor. I am often amazed at how little it takes for people who are not fully independent and are unaccustomed to independent political work to lose heart and turn sour. And the Geneva Bolsheviks are souring desperately. A serious struggle is underway; the Third Congress did not at all conclude it, of course, but only opened a new phase of it; the Iskra-ites are nimble and bustling, unscrupulous in a huckstering way, seasoned by long experience in demagogy—while among our people some kind of “conscientious stupidity” or “stupid conscientiousness” predominates. They do not know how to fight on their own; they are awkward, immobile, clumsy, timid... Nice lads, but utterly useless politicians. They lack tenacity,

* They say the leading article is desperate nonsense! Won’t you write a rebuttal quickly? If so, wire me. A. V. LUNACHARSKY. AUGUST 2, 1905.

they lack the spirit of struggle, agility, speed. Vas. Vas. is extremely typical in this regard: a most amiable personality, a most devoted worker, a most honest man, but I fear he will never be capable of becoming a politician. He is simply too kind—one can scarcely believe that “Galerka’s” pamphlets were written by him. He brings a fighting spirit neither to the organ (he keeps regretting that I do not let him write kind articles about the Bund!), nor to the colony. Some sort of spirit of whining reigns, and everyone reproaches me (I have been at the dacha for only three weeks and come to town for 4-5 hours three, sometimes even four times a week!) that things are not going well for them, that the Mensheviks are livelier, and so on and so forth!! And our Central Committee, firstly, is also not much of a “politician” itself, is also too kind, also suffers from a lack of tenacity, resourcefulness, sensitivity, an inability to politically exploit every trifle in the party struggle. And, secondly, it loftily despises the emigration and stubbornly refuses to let all the best people come here or takes them away from here. And so we find ourselves here, abroad, lagging behind. The ferment, the jolts, the impulses are lacking. People do not know how to act and fight on their own. Speakers at our own meetings are lacking. There is no one to infuse a spirit of vigour, to pose the question on a principled basis, to know how to lift it above the Geneva bog, into the sphere of more serious interests and questions. And the whole cause suffers.

In political struggle, a halt is death. There is a mass of urgent issues and they keep growing. The New-Iskrists are not dozing (now they have even “intercepted” the sailors* who arrived in Geneva; they have probably lured them with their characteristic huckstering political self-advertisement and are energetically marktschreien**, belatedly “utilising” the Odessa events in favour of their own coterie). We have an impossibly small number of forces. Vas. Vas., I do not know when he will write, and as an orator and a political centre he is beneath all criticism; he is more likely to spread whining himself than to shake people up and give them a pedagogical dressing-down. Schwarz is absent: he writes diligently and well from there, even seemingly better than here, but he only writes. Yet he is rarely capable of personally influencing

* This refers to participants in the uprising on the battleship *Potemkin*. — Ed.  
** — coaxing them into their little shop. — Ed.

V. I. LENIN

people and knowing how to direct the public and meetings, even when he is in Geneva. The centre here is large and serious. A mass of Russians. Hordes of travellers. Summer is a particularly lively moment, for among the multitudes of Russian tourists flocking to Geneva there is a certain percentage of people who must and can be used, shaken up, attracted, and directed. Think about all this and drop me a line in more detail (better to my personal address: 3. Rue David Dufour). Remember, you wrote: there will be no detriment from my absence from Geneva, because I write a lot and from afar. It is true that you write a lot, and the newspaper can be run somehow (but no more than somehow, and we devilishly need more than that). But the detriment not only exists, it is enormous, and it is felt more clearly than clear with each passing day. Personal influence and speaking at meetings mean a terrible lot in politics. Without them there is no political activity, and even the writing itself becomes less political. And with an opponent who disposes of large forces abroad, we are losing so much every week that we might not manage to catch up even in a month. The struggle for the party is not over, and you will not bring it to a real victory without straining every effort...

I shake your hand.  
Yours, N. Lenin