To A. M. Gorky
А. М. ГОРЬКОМУ
Date: 1917-07-31 (Old Style)
Source: PSS vol 51
Translated by: AI (Claude)

July 31, 1919

Dear Alexei Maximovich!

The more I reread your letter, the more I think about the connection between its conclusions and what is set forth in it (and what you told me during our meetings), the more I come to the conviction that both this letter and your conclusions and all your impressions are quite sick.

Piter is one of the sickest points in recent times. This is understandable, for its population has endured the most, the workers have given away most of their best forces, the hunger is severe, and the military danger is also great. Your nerves are clearly not holding up.

This is not surprising. And you are stubborn when you are told that you need to change your location, for to allow your nerves to be frayed to a sick state is quite unreasonable, even from the point of view of the crudest calculation, not to mention other points of view.

As in your conversations, in your letter there is a sum of sick impressions, leading you to sick conclusions.

You begin with dysentery and cholera; and immediately some kind of sick bitterness: "brotherhood, equality." Unconsciously, but it comes out something like communism being to blame for the need, poverty and diseases of a besieged city!!

Further, some bitter witticisms incomprehensible to me against "fence" literature (what kind? why connected with Kalinin?). And the conclusion, as if "insignificant remnants of reasonable workers" say that they were "betrayed" "into captivity to the peasant."

This is already completely inconsistent with anything. Is Kalinin being accused of betraying workers to the peasant? That's how it turns out.

Only workers who are either completely green, stupid, with a "left" phrase instead of a head, or frayed, exhausted, hungry, sick, or "remnants of the aristocracy," who superbly know how to distort everything and anything, superbly grasp at any trifle to pour out their furious hatred of Soviet power, could have invented this. These remnants you mention right there in the letter. Their mood has a morbid effect on you.

You write that you see "people of the most diverse strata." It is one thing to see, another thing to feel contact daily in all life. The latter you have to experience most of all from these "remnants" - by virtue of your profession alone, forcing you to "receive" dozens of embittered bourgeois intellectuals, and also by virtue of your living situation.

As if the "remnants" "harbor toward Soviet power something close to sympathy," while the "majority of workers" supplies thieves, attached "communists," etc.! And you arrive at the "conclusion" that revolution cannot be made with the help of thieves, cannot be made without the intelligentsia.

This is entirely sick psychology, exacerbated in the environment of embittered bourgeois intellectuals.

Everything is being done to attract the intelligentsia (non-White Guard) to the struggle against thieves. And every month in the Soviet republic the percentage of bourgeois intellectuals sincerely helping workers and peasants grows, and not only grumbling and spewing furious saliva. In Piter you "can't see" this, for Piter is a city with an exceptionally large number of bourgeois public (and "intelligentsia") that has lost its place (and head), but for all of Russia this is an indisputable fact.

In Piter or from Piter you can be convinced of this only with exceptional political awareness, with especially great political experience. You don't have this. And you are not engaged in politics and not in observing the work of political construction, but in a special profession that surrounds you with embittered bourgeois intelligentsia, understanding nothing, forgetting nothing, learning nothing, in the best - in the rarest best case - confused, despairing, moaning, repeating old prejudices, frightened and frightening themselves.

If one is to observe, one must observe below, where one can survey the work of the new construction of life, in a worker settlement in the provinces or in the village - there one does not need to politically encompass a sum of the most complex data, there one can only observe. Instead, you have placed yourself in the position of a professional editor of translations and the like, a position in which one cannot observe the new construction of new life, a position in which all forces are wasted on the sick grumbling of sick intelligentsia, on observing the "former" capital under conditions of desperate military danger and fierce need.

You have placed yourself in a position in which you cannot directly observe what is new in the life of workers and peasants, i.e., 9/10 of the population of Russia; in which you are forced to observe fragments of the life of the former capital, from which the flower of the workers has gone to the fronts and to the village and where a disproportionately large number of placeless and unemployed intelligentsia has remained, specifically "besieging" you. You stubbornly reject advice to leave.

It is understandable that you have brought yourself to illness: to live, you write, is not only hard, but also "very disgusting"!!! No wonder! In such a time to chain yourself to the sickest point as an editor of translated literature (the most suitable occupation for observing people, for an artist!). Neither what is new in the army, nor what is new in the village, nor what is new at the factory can you observe and study here as an artist. You have deprived yourself of the opportunity to do what would satisfy an artist - in Piter a politician can work, but you are not a politician. Today - pointlessly broken glass, tomorrow - shots and screams from prison, then fragments of speeches from the most tired of the non-workers remaining in Piter, then a million impressions from the intelligentsia, metropolitan intelligentsia without a metropolis, then hundreds of complaints from the offended, in free time from editorship, no construction of life can be seen (it goes on in a special way and least of all in Piter) - how can one not bring oneself to the point where life is very disgusting.

The country is living with a fever of struggle against the bourgeoisie of the whole world, taking furious revenge for its overthrow. Natural. For the first Soviet republic - the first blows from everywhere. Natural. Here one must live either as an active politician, and if the soul does not lie toward politics, then as an artist observe how life is being built in a new way where there is no center of furious attack on the capital, of furious struggle with conspiracies, of furious malice of metropolitan intelligentsia, in the village or at a provincial factory (or at the front). There it is easy by simple observation to separate the decomposition of the old from the shoots of the new.

Life has become disgusting, "the divergence with communism is deepening." What the divergence consists of, it is impossible to understand. There is not a shadow of indication of divergence in politics or in ideas. The divergence of mood between people conducting politics or absorbed in struggle of the most furious kind, and the mood of a person who has artificially driven himself into such a position that new life cannot be observed, and impressions of the decay of a huge bourgeois capital overwhelm.

I have frankly expressed to you my thoughts about your letter. From conversations (with you) I have long been approaching the same thoughts, but your letter formalized and finished, completed the sum of impressions from your conversations. I do not want to impose advice, but I cannot help saying: radically change your environment, and surroundings, and place of residence, and occupation, otherwise life may become disgusting once and for all.

I firmly shake your hand.

Yours, Lenin

Sent to Petrograd
First published in 1925 in "Krasnaya Letopis" No. 1
Printed from the manuscript