From Lenin

20. 9. 05.

Dear friend! Thank you for letter no. 3. Perhaps we shall print part of it.80 You are taking the initiative in a conversation with the editorial board not merely on formal questions (about the charter, about connections, addresses, etc.), not only on correspondent topics (such and such events occurred), but on the question of the content of your views, of your understanding of our tactics, of how exactly you are implementing it in practice in reports, at meetings, etc. Such conversations with Russian practitioners are extremely valuable to us, and I most earnestly ask you everywhere and in all places to preach, to remind, to insist that whoever wishes to consider the CO his CO (and every party member should wish this), must not limit himself to formal replies or reports, but must precisely have conversations—not for publication, but for the creation of ideological connection—with the editorial board about the implementation of such and such views. To consider such conversations mere trifling means falling into narrow-minded practicism and leaving entirely to chance all the principled, ideological aspect of all our practical work, of all our agitation, because without clear, well-thought-out, ideological content, agitation degenerates into empty phrases. And for the development of clear ideological content, the contribution alone to the CO is insufficient; there is also necessary joint discussion of how practitioners understand one or another proposition, how in practice they implement one or another view.

Without this, the editorial board of the CO will remain hanging in the air, will not know whether its preaching is being received, whether people are responding to it, how life is modifying it, what corrections and additions are needed. Without this, social democrats will sink to the point where the writer writes away and the reader reads away. Our sense of party connection is still weak—it must be reinforced both by word and by example.

I shall try to make use of your example in printing part of your letter. In general we agree and have reached accord with you (your thoughts coincide with mine in "Two Tactics"). In particular, it seems to me you are wrongly attacking the Mensheviks for the words: preparation of the masses for uprising. If there is an error here, it is not a fundamental one.

Pressing your hand firmly. Your Lenin

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Sent from Geneva to Odessa

First printed in 1926 in Lenin Miscellany V

Printed from the manuscript