V. I. Lenin

Source: ru:PSS/v47;es:MT
Translated: machine translation (DeepSeek) from the Russian; AI-translated.

To the Moscow Committee

Concerning the reply of the Moscow Committee to the “Open Letter” signed by NN on the “party school”, the editorial board of *Proletary* (in its enlarged composition) expresses its complete solidarity with the view of the Moscow Committee that a local organisation cannot and should not assume responsibility for such an undertaking.\(^{177}\) Given the character and scope of activity planned by the initiators, and the extreme remoteness of the future school’s location from the areas of local work, effective control over such a school could be exercised only by the party centres.

Further, the editorial board of *Proletary* considers it necessary to supplement one of the statements contained in the “Open Letter” you have received.

It states, among other things, that “the supply of the school with literary and practical forces” (teaching staff) “is in train and proceeding successfully”; that “all the prominent theoreticians of the party, chiefly from the Bolsheviks, will take part” in the school.

These statements need precisely the supplement that both the editorial board of *Proletary* and the theoreticians and practical workers of our faction who are members of the narrow and broad composition of the editorial board and of the Party Central Committee first learned of the school being organised from the Moscow Committee, and have received no communications from the organisers and participants of the school to this day. And the editorial board is compelled to recognise that this path of complete isolation, chosen by the organisers of the undertaking, is in this particular case inevitable, having profound ideological grounds. It will suffice here to point to the open pronouncement of *Proletary* (see No. 42) against “god-building” and other distortions of Marxism connected with it.

Under such organisational conditions, and in view of the obviously exceptionally close connection of the future school with elements preaching “god-building” or supporting this preaching, the editorial board of *Proletary* considers it its duty to declare that it does not vouch for the school’s character either as Bolshevik or as Marxist in general.

For all that, the editorial board believes that the legal rights of the projected school to exist within the framework of the party at the present time are indisputable. The faction should not bind itself to an undertaking whose Bolshevik and Marxist character is not guaranteed; the party as a whole, in its present state, when even extreme opportunists of the type of Prokopovich-Kuskova operate in its very important institutions (e.g., in the college of experts attached to the Duma faction), cannot deny it the right to exist. Therefore, the editorial board believes that the Bolsheviks on the Central Committee, to whom the initiators should apply for approval of the school, should speak in favour of its approval.