V. I.

Lenin

546

To:   INESSA ARMAND

Dear Friend, I received the translation. Thanks awfully. I have sent it
on. [1]

As regards the censorship to which you have subjected my French
article, [2]

I am surprised, really. As you did not send me the original, aid I would
hardly undertake a French translation myself, I sent it, of course, as you
suggested, omitting the passage about Engels.

“ The mere thought that I am defending Engels’s point of view on war
and on the stand the Germans took at the time, makes your blood boil and
you cannot translate it....”

Well, well! I am surprised! We, Grigory and I, quoted this
passage—more than passage: statement, declaration of Engels—many times,
directly and indirectly, in 1914 and 1915.

Engels, it should be remembered, wrote this first for the
French socialists and it was published in their Almanach du Parti Ouvrier . [3] At that time the French did not protest, feeling—if not realising clearly—that the war of
Boulanger+Alexander III against Germany of those days would be
anti-democratic only on their part, but on the part of Germany (of
whose imperialism there could be no question at the time!!) it
would really be only “defence”, really a war for national existence.

And now, what the French themselves acknowledged in 1891 to be correct,
you suddenly cry down, and how! And just before that, at a meeting of the
Swiss Lefts, they (semi pacifists, what can you do?) dismissed my reference
to this statement of Engels’s with amazing frivolity of their own peculiar
brand.

You did not say anything either about my article in reply to Kievsky.

My work with the Swiss Lefts, like my reflections on the absurdities
which Radek has talked himself into, convince me more and more that on the
vital question of motives for rejecting defence of the fatherland
our stand is the only correct one. Have you seen No. 6 of
Jugend-Internationale , of which I wrote in Sb. No. 2 (did
you get it?) and Arbeiterpolitik
No. 25? [4]

I have received a postcard from Kamenev. I shall send it to you. Olga
writes that things are looking up with the Lefts, that an organisation of
Zimmerwald Lefts, French+ Italian (!! I am ever so pleased about
this)+Russian, has been founded and that Guilbeaux will write to me about
it (I shall forward it on to you, if you like). I try to follow
Avanti! and am becoming convinced that Souvarine is right: Turati
is quite a Kautskyite and he is switching the whole Italian socialist
parliamentary group (into these lines. His last speech (17.I) is smart:
he’s a smart alec of bourgeois pacifism, and not a socialist at all.

I wish you the very, very best, Yours, Lenin

---
Notes:
[1]
See Document 544 in this volume.— Ed .

[2]
See “An Open Letter to Boris Souvarine” (present edition, Vol. 23,
pp. 195–204).— Ed .

[3]
See F. Engels, “Socialism in Germany” (“Der Sozialismus in
Deutschland”, Marx/Engels, Werke , Bd. 22, Dietz Verlag, Berlin,
1963, S. 252–60).

[4]

No. 6 of the journal Jugend-Internationale , which came out on
December 1, 1916, carried an article by Bukharin (over the signature “Note
Bene”) entitled “The Imperialist Robber State”. A criticism of this
article will be found in Lenin’s “The Youth International” published in
Sbornik Sotsial-Demokrata No. 2 (see present edition, Vol. 23,
pp. 163–66).

This article of Bukharin’s, slightly abbreviated, was published in
Arbeiterpolitik No. 25, December 9, 1916, under the heading “The
Imperialist State”.