V. I.

Lenin

210

To:   WILHELM KOENEN, AUGUST THALHEIMER AND PAUL FRÖHLICH

16/VI,

Comrades Koenen

Thalheimer

Fröhlich

Dear Comrades!

I have received a copy of your letter to our Party’s
Central Committee. Thank you very much. I communicated my answer orally yesterday. I take this opportunity to
emphasise that I do most resolutely withdraw the rude and impolite expressions I used, and hereby repeat my oral
apology in writing. [1]

With communist greetings, Lenin

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Notes:
[1]
In a letter to the R.C.P.(B.) Central Committee, on June 16, 1921,
Wilhelm Koenen, August Thalheimer and Paul Fröhlich declared
that the German delegation at the Third Congress of the
Comintern, while approving the theses on tactics worked out by the
Russian delegation, demanded that in the event of the congress
adopting a special resolution on the March action, it should include
the following propositions: =

1) the March action was not a putsch,
but a step forward in the development of the German revolution
and the Party, and it is wrong to characterise it as an offensive
without sufficiently extensive preparation; =

2) Paul Levi’s expulsion
from the Party is correct; =

3) all factional activity in the U.C.P.G.
is prohibited, etc.

In saying that he had given a verbal reply to the letter, Lenin
must have meant his speech at the sitting of the German
delegation with the members of the Politbureau of the R.C.P.(B.)
Central Committee on June 15, 1921, in which ho sharply criticised
representatives of the “Left” wing of the U.C.P.G. There is no
record of his speech, but the notes of the speeches by Karl Radek,
Wilhelm Koenen, August Thalheimer, Béla Kun and others, which
Lenin made at the sitting, contained the following remark:
“cursing of the German Leftists of the VKPD (15/VI. 1921)” (Central
Party Archives of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the
C.P.S.U. Central Committee).

For the section of the theses on tactics “Lessons of the March

Action” and the resolution “The March Events and the United
Communist Party of Germany”, adopted by the Third Congress
of the Comintern, see Kommunistichesky Internatsional v dokumentakh. 1919–1932. Moscow, 1933, pp. 194, 225.