V. I.

Lenin

143

To:   THE EDITORS OF BERNER TAGWACHT [1]

Statement . Berner Tagwacht No. 24 (Thursday, January 30) carries a statement by L. Martov in regard to the case of
Dr. Semashko, a Russian comrade arrested in
Geneva. [2] In this statement Martov for some strange reason refers to
Semashko only as a journalist who had been present at the International
Socialist Congress in Stuttgart; at the same time he calls himself a
“delegate of Russian Social-Democracy at the Stuttgart Congress”.

The Swiss workers will unquestionably interpret this statement of
Martov’s to mean that Semashko has nothing to do with the Russian
Social-Democratic Party.

In order that Martov’s utterly inaccurate mode of expression should not
mislead anyone, I, as representative of the Russian Social-Democratic Party
in the International Socialist Bureau, hereby declare that Dr. Semashko is
an old member of our Party and that he was at the International Congress
both as a member of the Party and as a journalist working for the Party
press.

I feel this explanation to be necessary inasmuch as our Swiss comrades
are clearly evincing considerable interest in Semashko’s arrest. All the
Russian comrades who know him are firmly convinced that he is in no way
implicated in the Tiflis “expropriation” nor could he have been. And not
only because the last (London) Congress of our Party categorically rejected
this “method of struggle”, but also because Dr. Semashko has lived
uninterruptedly since February

1907 in Geneva, where he has engaged in literary activity.

We are firmly convinced that the international Social-Democratic press
will very soon be able to welcome the release of the comrade arrested in
Geneva with the same justified joy as Vorwärts (in Berlin) and
l’Humanité (in Paris) at one time welcomed the release of the
comrades unjustly arrested in Paris.

N. Lenin ,

Representative of the Russian Social-

Democratic Labour Party in the International Socialist Bureau

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Notes:
[1]
Berner Tagwacht —a newspaper published by the
Social-Democratic Party of Switzerland.

[2]
The arrests in Geneva were connected with the changing of money
expropriated in Tiflis on June 13, 1907. The organiser of the
expropriation, Kamo (Ter-Petrosyan), and all the participants in it managed
to escape. But the tsarist authorities informed the police abroad of the
serial numbers of the 500-ruble banknotes seized in the expropriation; in
December 1907, persons changing these banknotes were arrested
simultaneously in Berlin, Munich, Paris, Copenhagen, Stockholm and Geneva. In November 1907, Kamo was
betrayed by the provocateur Y. A. Zhitomirsky and arrested in Berlin. The
Russian Government, having established Kamo’s identity, secured his
extradition as a criminal. During the search for the Tiflis expropriators,
arrests were made in the Russian Social-Democratic colonies in Berlin,
Paris, Munich, Geneva and Stockholm. Protests against the violation of the
right of asylum for political emigrants compelled the West-European police
to release the arrested shortly after.