V. I.

Lenin

11

To:   THE EDITOR OF PRAVDA [2]

Dear Colleague, I send you one more article by I. Gylka. The author
reminds you that he is expecting an advance .

It is urgently necessary to reply to him immediately (you can do it through me, but without fail on a separate
sheet). The author lives in Lemberg, makes a special study
of his subject, and such a contributor should be drawn in.
Once again I advise you to pay him an advance, and in any
case to reply to him at once .

N.B. If Gylka’s articles are not accepted, return them at once without fail!

We have received the parcel, and cannot help complaining.

Of the books, only one ! Write and say why. Did other members of the staff take the rest of the books received?
Have they taken them for long, or for good? If so, you ought to arrange to send them to us for a time . We repeat
that without books we cannot work.

The office should be more careful about this.

We received the Voter’s Handbook two and a half weeks after publication ! Yet to send it at once would have cost
5 kopeks ....

There has been a delay with the papers, after all. We are stuck here without newspapers, and we shall be without
them for another two or three days.

I would very much advise you to send a reporter to the
City Council, find out how many applications [1] they are
getting from tenants and set about publishing this systematically (encouraging successful districts and appealing
to the unsuccessful). Very little time is left, and the paper
should make itself responsible for the whole business.

You should get from the City Council, through any statisticians among your acquaintances (or officially from the
editors and the members of the State Duma), all the statistical material (if they don’t exist, then buy
Rech [3] for those years and months, or some other paper) about the
elections to the First, Second and Third State Duma +
Petersburg statistics (housing, population, etc.). With such
material in your hands, and with an intelligent reporter
visiting the City Council daily or 2–3 times a week, you
can run a good section in the paper about the course of the
elections.

Do you send Pravda to the Wiener
Arbeiter-Zeitung [4] in Vienna? Send it, and send it to us as well by wrapper .

I advise you to reply to Trotsky through the post: “To
Trotsky (Vienna). We shall not reply to disruptive and slanderous letters.”
Trotsky’s dirty campaign against Pravda is one mass of lies and slander. The well-known Marxist
and follower of Plekhanov, Rothstein (London), has written to us that he received Trotsky’s slanders and replied
to him: I cannot complain of the Petersburg Pravda in any way. But this intriguer and liquidator goes on lying,
right and left.

Yours faithfully,
V. Ulyanov

P.S. It would be still better to reply in this way to Trotsky
through the post: “ To Trotsky (Vienna). You are wasting
your time sending us disruptive and slanderous letters.
They will not be replied to.”

---
Notes:
[1]
From what districts? streets? etc., as detailed as possible.— Lenin

[2]
Pravda (Truth)–the first legal mass workers’ daily in Russia.
The first issue appeared in St. Petersburg on May 5, 1912.

Pravda played a key role in the history of the Bolshevik Party
and the revolution. It was a collective propagandist, agitator and
organiser in the struggle to put the Party’s policy into practice.
As a centre of the campaign for Party principles, it fought
resolutely against the Menshevik liquidators, otzovists and Trotskyists
and opposed international opportunism. Pravda helped to build a
firm foundation for a mass Bolshevik party.

Lenin guided the policy of Pravda , which published 270 of his
articles. The paper was closed down eight times by the tsarist
government but continued to appear under fresh names: Rabochaya Pravda (Workers’ Truth), =

Severnaya Pravda (Northern Truth), =

Pravda Truda (Truth of Labour), =

Za Pravdu (For Truth), =

Proletarskaya Pravda (Proletarian Truth), =

Put Pravdy (Path of Truth), =

Rabochy (The Worker), = and Trudovaya Pravda (Labour Truth).
Before the outbreak of the First World War, on July 21, 1914, the
paper was banned and did not recommence publication until after
the February bourgeois-democratic revolution of 1917.

On March 18, 1917, Pravda began appearing as the organ of the
Central and Petrograd Committees of the R.S.D.L.P. On April 18,
upon his return from abroad, Lenin joined the editorial board and
became its leading spirit. Between July and October 1917, the
paper was persecuted by the bourgeois Provisional Government
and had frequently to change its name, appearing as Listok Pravdy (Pravda’s News Sheet), =

Proletary (The Proletarian), =

Rabochy (The
Worker), and =

Rabochy Put (Workers’ Path). After the victory of the October Socialist Revolution, on November 9, 1917, the
Party’s central organ began appearing under its original name Pravda.

[3]
Rech (Speech)—daily newspaper, central organ of the
Constitutional-Democratic Party; appeared in St. Petersburg from
February 1906 to October 1917.

[4]
Wiener Arbeiter-Zeitung (Vienna Workers’ Newspaper)—daily
newspaper, central organ of the Austrian Social-Democratic Party,
founded by Victor Adler in Vienna in 1889. Banned in 1934, it
resumed publication in 1945 as the central organ of the Socialist
Party of Austria.