2 August 1905

Dear An. Vas.! Yesterday I sent you a “business” letter and asked you to send Iskra No. 105* and L. Feuerbach by Plekhanov. Today I feel like having a chat outside current little affairs.

* They say the editorial is utter nonsense! Could you write something against it as soon as possible? If yes, wire me.

The mood of our people in Geneva is bad. I am often amazed at how little it takes for people who are not fully independent and unaccustomed to independent political work to lose heart and go sour. And our Geneva Bolsheviks are going sour desperately. The struggle is a serious one, the Third Congress did not finish it at all, of course, but only opened a new phase of it. The Iskraists are agile and bustling, shameless in a huckstering way, skilled by long experience in demagogy—while among our people some kind of “conscientious stupidity” or “stupid conscientiousness” predominates. They themselves can’t fight, they’re clumsy, immobile, awkward, timid... Dear lads, but as politicians they’re good for the devil. They lack tenacity, lack fighting spirit, adroitness, speed. Vas. Vas. is extremely typical in this respect: the nicest person, the most devoted worker, the most honest man—he, I fear, will never be capable of becoming a politician. He is too kind—one can’t even believe that the “Galerkin” pamphlets were written by him. He brings no fighting spirit either to the organ (he keeps regretting that I don’t let him write kind articles about the Bund!) or to the colony. A sort of whining spirit reigns, and I (I’ve only been at the dacha for three weeks and I go to town for 4–5 hours three or even four times a week!) am blamed by everyone for their affairs going badly, for the Mensheviks being brisker, etc.! And our Central Committee, first, is also not much of a “politician”, also too kind, also suffers from insufficient tenacity, resourcefulness, sensitivity, and inability to make political use of every trifle in the party struggle. And, second, it loftily despises abroad and stubbornly won’t let the best people come here or takes them away from here. And here we are, abroad, behind. There is a lack of ferment, of jolts, of impulses. People can’t act and fight on their own. There are no orators at our meetings. There is no one to pour in a spirit of cheer, to pose questions in a principled way, to lift things above the Geneva swamp, into the sphere of more serious interests and questions. And the whole cause suffers. In political struggle, standstill is death. There are a host of demands and they keep growing. The New Iskraists are not dozing (now they have also “intercepted” the sailors who had arrived in Geneva*, luring them, probably, with their characteristic huckstering political advertising and are strenuously *marktschreien**, “utilising” the Odessa events retroactively in favour of their coterie). With us the forces are impossibly few. Vas. Vas., I don’t know when he will write, and as an orator and political centre he is below all criticism—he is more likely to spread whining himself than to shake people up and give them a pedagogic dressing-down. Shvarts is absent: he writes assiduously and well from there, even as if better than here, but he only writes. And to personally influence people and to know how to guide the crowd and meetings he is rarely in a state to do even when he is in Geneva. The centre here is large, serious. A mass of Russians. A host of people travelling. Summer is even a particularly brisk moment, because from the abyss of Russian tourists who come to Geneva there is a certain percentage of people whom one must and can use, shake up, attract, direct.

* This refers to participants in the uprising on the battleship Potemkin. —Ed.
** — shouting their wares. —Ed.

Think about all this and drop me a line in more detail (better to my private address: 3, Rue David Dufour). Remember, you wrote: there will be no loss from my absence from Geneva, because I write a lot and from a distance. It is true that you write a lot, and one can manage the newspaper somehow (but not more than somehow, while we devilishly need more). But the loss is not only there, it is a huge loss, which is felt more clearly than ever with every day. Personal influence and speaking at meetings mean an awful 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, with every week we are losing so much that we probably couldn’t catch up in a month. The struggle for the party is not over, and you won’t bring it to a real victory without straining all your forces...

I shake your hand. Yours, N. Lenin

Viareggio (Italy)

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Sent from Geneva