This is a fact. Tens of thousands of officers are serving in our Red Army and are victorious in spite of hundreds of traitors. This is a fact.

As for your moods, I “understand” them (since you have raised the question of whether I will understand you). More than once, both on Capri and afterwards, I have told you: you are allowing yourself to be surrounded precisely by the worst elements of the bourgeois intelligentsia and are succumbing to its whining.

You hear and listen to the wailing of hundreds of intellectuals about the “terrible” arrest for a few weeks, but you do not hear or listen to the voice of the masses, millions, of workers and peasants who are threatened by Denikin, Kolchak, Lianozov, Rodzyanko, the Krasnaya Gorka (and other Cadet) conspirators. I fully understand, I fully, fully understand that this way you can wind up not only claiming that “the Reds are as much the enemies of the people as the Whites” (that the fighters for the overthrow of capitalists and landowners are as much enemies of the people as the landowners and capitalists themselves), but also to belief in God or the little father tsar. I fully understand.*

Really, you will perish if you do not tear yourself away from this milieu of bourgeois intellectuals! I wholeheartedly wish that you tear yourself away as soon as possible.

Best greetings!

Yours, Lenin

* For you are not writing! To waste yourself on the whining of rotten intellectuals and not write – for an artist, is that not ruin, is that not shame?

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Written on September 15, 1919

Sent to Petrograd

Printed for the first time, from the manuscript