V. I.

Lenin

To:   MAXIM GORKY

Dear A. M., We shall shortly send you the resolutions of the
Conference. [1] We have finally succeeded—in spite of the
liquidationist [2] scoundrels—in reviving the Party and its Central
Committee. I hope you will be as glad of this as we are.

Won’t you write a May Day leaflet for us? Or a little leaflet in a similar May Day spirit? Quite a short one, a
“heart-warmer”, what do you say? Think of old times, remember 1905, and put down a couple of words, if you
have the mind to write. There are two or three illegal printing-presses in Russia, and the Central Committee will
republish it, probably, in several tens of thousands of copies.
It would be a good thing to gel a revolutionary manifesto
like the Tales in
Zvezda . [3] T am very, very glad that you are helping Zvezda . We are having a devilish hard job with
it—internal and external and financial difficulties are
immense—but still we are managing so far.

All the best, >Lenin

P.S. And
Sovremennik [4] has had the sense to die, after all! That was a good deed on its part.

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Notes:
[1]
Reference is to the resolutions passed by the Sixth (Prague)
All-Russia Conference of the R.S.D.L.P. of 1912. The resolutions and
“Announcement” concerning the Conference were published in
booklet form in Paris in February 1912 by the C.C. of the
R.S.D.L.P.

[2]
Liquidationism —an opportunist trend in the R.S.D.L.P. that
emerged in the period of reaction following the defeat of the 1905–
07 revolution. The liquidators demanded liquidation of the illegal
revolutionary party of the working class and tried to subordinate
the working-class movement to bourgeois interests. The Sixth
(Prague) All-Russia Conference of the R.S.D.L.P. expelled the
liquidators from the Party.

[3]
Zvezda (The Star)—legal Bolshevik newspaper (December 1910–
May 5, 1912). In 1911 and 1912 it published seven stories by Gorky
from his Tales of Italy series.

[4]
Sovremennik (The Contemporary)—literary and political monthly
published in St. Petersburg from 1911 to 1915. It was a rallying
point for Menshevik liquidators, Socialist-Revolutionaries,
Popular Socialists and Left-wing liberals.