V. I.

Lenin

(ONCE MORE FOR THE ATTENTION OF LUCH AND PRAVDA READERS)

In Pravda
No. 102 [1]

I called the attention of reader comrades to an article in Luch
Nos. 93 and 94.

I compared that article with those published simultaneously in
Pravda under the heading “Controversial
Issues”. [2]

I said that Pravda in its articles gives the reader facts and
documents with which to decide disputed questions of organisation and
tactics while Luch in its article gives him gossip and personal
insults that do not help the workers to under stand the dispute and only
serve to clutter up their heads.

I said that the Luch article speaks of the active people of
1905 in the same terms as the organs of terrified landowners and of
liberals embittered against the workers.

Luck has sent the worker Herman against me. The worker Herman
is a man of determination and possesses a ready tongue. He has berated me
in no uncertain terms. I, he says, “want to mislead our reader comrades”
and am telling “obvious untruths” and nothing of what I said has ever
actually happened. Having thus accused me of a number of crimes, the worker
Herman then rounds off his article with a list of titles of articles
printed in Luch .

Very good! But what about the article in Luch that I actually
spoke about, and which I quoted? The worker Herman does not say a single word about that article, makes no attempt to dispute the
correctness of the words I quoted from it, and offers nothing to contest my
characterisation of the article as impermissible in the working-class
press. What reason is there for that? You cursed me uphill and down dale,
my dear man, but not only could you not dis prove a single word of what I said about the Luch article, you did
not even try to.

Did the article I wrote about appear in issues 93 and 94? It did. And
so what right have you to state that “nothing of the sort has actually
happened”?

Is that article full of gossip and bickering instead of a calm analysis
of the disagreements? You did not dare say a word against that! What right
have you to suspect me of a desire to “mislead the comrades”?

Did you understand what you were writing? Did you realise that you, in
accusing a contributor to a working-class newspaper of “obvious untruths”
and a desire to “mislead readers”, have to be ready to answer for it, not
to me, but to all those who stand behind Pravda , that is, to its
working-class readers?

You undertook to defend Luch against my accusation that the
article in issues 93 and 94 does not explain disputed questions but
clutters up the heads of its readers with gossip and “personalities”. For
that purpose you published in the columns of the same Luch a
number of unfounded accusations and obvious libels (“Reader” [referring
to me] wants to mislead our reader comrades), i.e., you did exactly what I
accused Luch of doing in its article in issue 94. Your article was a confirmation of my accusation against Luch and not a refutation
of it.

Perhaps you will now say—it was all due to your inexperience. Very
good. But your article was read by the editors. Why did they not warn you?
Why did they not tell you that when accusing me you would first of all have
to refute what I had said about the facts I mentioned, and not evade them
by further silence? Why? Apparently because the editors knew that
everything I had said about the article in issues 93 and 94 was true, they
knew that what I said could not be refuted. That is why they allowed you to
indulge in plain vituperation, that is, they repeated the very method I had
accused them of in my first article.

Was this a creditable role that you, who signed yourself “worker”,
played in the hands of the Luch editors?