V. I.

Lenin

193

To:   L. B. KAMENEV

6. IV. 10

Dear K., I received your letter (at last! I was about to kick up a row ). It is too late to send an express message or a wire.

We are in too “great haste”, you write. I don’t know.... [1]

How could Dan and Co. have been allowed to get away with it? And what
else ... wait for. But it is a great pity you were not in “greater haste”
to write us at once about the “formal doubts” entertained by the
Pravda liquidators. The proofs were sent to you ten days ago: if
you had made haste to reply at once that you are not clear 011
this or that point, you would have had complete copies of the letters from
Russia already a week ago. Now the C.O., which came out late last
night, gives more quotations from the letters. [2]

Is your withdrawal from Pravda essential for us? [3] You seem almost ready to say yes—again being “in haste” to
write after the very first conflict with Trotsky.

I personally do not think that your withdrawal from Pravda is
essential [to us], so long as Pravda [is] run so colourlessly. After reading ... [your] item in No. 11, I thought ([and]
Grigory also said): this is toothless, colourless, [inconsequential],
verbose....

What is the purpose of our policy now , at this precise moment?
To build the Party core not on the cheap phrases of
Trotsky and Co. but on genuine ideological rapprochement between
the Plekhanovites and the Bolsheviks. Whether this will work out I
do not know. If it doesn’t, then back to the Bolshevik Centre. If it does,
it will be a substantial step forward.

We shall write to the Russian C.C. (insisting that Makar call it
together without waiting for the Menshevik scoundrels) that Dan (and
Martov) should be expelled from the C.O. and Igor from the C.C. Bureau Abroad and replaced with
Plekhanovites. The Plekhanovites printed ... [in an issue ] of Golos Sotsial-Demokrata (you [ought to receive it ] within a few
days [4] ).

... [53] for the Golos people ... against ... 10 .... For the
Plekhanovites 11 ... but it isn’t do much a matter of numbers as of the
beginning of a break . The first step is always the hardest.

In a few days the Mensheviks Will publish Martynov’s reply to
Plekhanov and, evidently, a reply to the C.O. Although Plekhanov does
wish to keep open the possibility of “returning” to the
Golos people, nothing so far seems to be coming of it.

Your withdrawal from Pravda —if it is inevitable—should in
my view be arranged with the utmost care (write an article against the
liquidators and against Golos , let Trotsky turn it down!) with a
view to reporting to the C.O. and drafting a decision on the
publication of a popular newspaper by the Central Organ. Either that, or
back to....

The Vienna group will say nothing.

About the report, I am not satisfied. To remind a per son does not mean
to harass him. Send the beginning . The whole thing by May 1 will
be too late.

With best regards, Yours, Lenin

---
Notes:
[1]
Manuscript partly damaged. Here and further on several words are
illegible. Words in square brackets have been inserted as suggest ed by the
context and the remaining legible letters.— Ed .

[2]
A reference to Lenin’s article “ Golos (Voice) of the
Liquidators Against the Party (Reply to Golos Sotsial-Demokrata )”
giving documentary proof of the refusal of the Menshevik liquidator members
of the C.C., R.S.D.L.P., to take part in the work of the C.C. and even in
the session held to co-opt new members (see present edition, Vol. 16,
pp. 156–64).

[3]

L. B. Kamenev was delegated to the Editorial Board of Trotsky’s
Pravda after the January 1910 plenary meeting of the Central
Committee, which put off the question of making the paper an organ of the
C.C. until the next Party conference, but decided to subsidise it and to
send its representative to the Editorial Board “as a third editor”. After
the publication in the paper’s issue No. 14 of “Letter from
Pravda to Thinking Workers” in which Trotsky sided with the
liquidators and the otzovists, Kamenev withdrew from the Editorial Board.

[4]
A reference to G. V. Plekhanov’s article “The Latest Plenary Meeting
of Our Central Committee” published in Dnevnik Sotsial-Demokrata
(Diary of a Social-Democrat) No. 11 (March 1910) in which he wrote:
“... what is Golos Sotsial-Demokrata for Mensheviks of a certain
orientation? It is in effect their factional—and, moreover,
irresponsible—centre. By voting for the resolution pledging the closure
of Golos ... our ‘Mensheviks’—members of the C.C.—laid down on
the altar of the Party the heart, so to say, of their faction. The skeptic
will say that not all promises are carried out. But, I repeat, we have no
right to think that the comrades who gave this promise were insincere.”