V. I.

Lenin

162

To:   THE MOSCOW COMMITTEE OF THE R.S.D.L.P.

To the Moscow Committee

In reference to the M.C.’s reply to the “Open Letter” on the “Party
school” [1] signed NN, the Editorial Board of Proletary
(enlarged) expresses its full solidarity with the view of the M.C. that a
local organisation cannot and should not take the responsibility for any
such undertaking. Considering the character of the future school and the
range of its activities as planned by its sponsors, and its extreme
remoteness from the areas of local activity, effective supervision over
such a school could be exercised only by the Party centres.

Further, the editors of Proletary consider it necessary to
amplify one of the statements contained in the “Open Letter” you have
received.

Among other things it says that the matter of “supplying the school
with literary and practical workers” (teaching personnel) is “well in
hand and proceeding successfully”; that “all the prominent Party
theoreticians, mainly Bolsheviks, will take part” in the school.

The addition that should be made to these statements is that both the
Editorial Board of Proletary and the theoreticians and practical
workers of our group who are members of the narrow and enlarged Editorial
Board and also of the C.C. of the Party, first learned of the said school
from the Moscow Committee, while having had no intimation of it up till now
from the organisers and the participants in the school. In the given
instance, the Editorial Board cannot but regard the course of isolated
action chosen by the organisers of this undertaking as inevitably stem ming
from deep ideological roots. Here it will suffice to call attention to the
open criticism by Proletary (see No. 42) of “god-building” and
other distortions of Marxism associated with it.

In these organisational conditions and in view of the obvious
exceptionally close connection of the future school with elements preaching
“god-building” or supporting that preachment, the Editorial Board of
Proletary considers itself in duty bound to declare that it cannot
vouch for the character of the school being either Bolshevik or Marxist in
general.

For all that the Editorial Board assumes that the legal right of the
projected school to exist within the frame work of the Party is at the
present time indisputable. The group should not involve itself in an
enterprise the Bolshevik and Marxist character of which is not ensured;
however, the Party as a whole in its present state, when in some of its
very important institutions (e.g., in the collegium of advisers to the Duma
group) there are even extreme opportunists of the type of Prokopovich or
Kuskova, cannot deny it the right to exist. The Editorial Board therefore
considers that the Bolsheviks in the C.C., to which the initiators should
apply for endorsement of the school project, should vote in favour of endorsement .