V. I.

Lenin

23

To:   THE EDITOR OF PRAVDA

Dear Colleague, I send you the St. Petersburg Mandate which by chance,
thanks to an opportunity of very speedy delivery, reached
us from Petersburg. Publish this Mandate to the St.
Petersburg deputy without fail, in a prominent position and in
large type. It is quite intolerable that Luch , distorting
the Mandate, is already mentioning it and printing reports
about it, while Pravda , whose supporters drew up the
Mandate and got it adopted and put it into action, is silent
about it.... What does this mean? Can a workers’ newspaper exist if it behaves with such contempt for what
interests the workers? (Naturally, if certain expressions and
phrases are undesirable from the censorship point of view,
partial changes are possible, as usually happens in such
cases.) But not to print such a thing means not only to
give ground for hundreds of disputes, in which Pravda will be the guilty party, but also to inflict the greatest
possible damage on it as a newspaper, on the circulation
and organisation of the paper as an undertaking. A newspaper, after all, is not just something for the reader to do
a bit of reading in and the writer to do a bit of writing in.
A newspaper must itself seek out, itself discover in good
time arid, at the appropriate moment, print certain material.
A paper must look for and find the contacts it needs. Yet here
suddenly is a Mandate to the St. Petersburg deputy, coming
from the supporters of Pravda , but not printed in Pravda ...
Please reply immediately on receiving this letter.