He's crawling into the crevice of disagreement among us: the age-old politics of scoundrels and blackguards, impotent to argue with us directly and resorting to intrigues, treachery, vileness.

Here is a picture for you of what is — and of what Radek is doing (a man is judged not by what he says about himself or thinks, but by what he does — remember this Marxist truth?).

Voila*.

This is the kind of "milieu" we have to fight!!

And what theoretical filth and nonsense in Radek's "theses"...

I read Humbert-Droz's "Plaidoirie". My God, what a vulgar Tolstoyan prig!! I also wrote to Abramovich: is it really so hopeless? I think: is there not a bacillus of petty-bourgeois (and petty-stateist) stupidity, Tolstoyanism, pacifism in Switzerland, destroying the best people? There certainly is!

I read the second pamphlet by P. Golay ("L'Antimilitarisme")**—what a gigantic step backward compared to the first ("Le Socialisme qui meurt"***) and into the same swamp...

I shake your hand firmly. Yours, Lenin

P.S. Are you skiing at all? Be sure to ski! Learn, get yourself skis and go in the mountains — absolutely. It's wonderful in the mountains in winter! Splendid, and it smells of Russia.

in Clarens (Switzerland)

Written December 18, 1916

Sent from Zurich

First published in 1949 in the journal "Bolshevik" no. 1

Printed from the manuscript