Date: 1921-09-08
Source: ru:ND; en:Pipes

Comrade Berzin!

Your note on the decline of revolutionary fervor within the English working class is “not quite right,” it “hasn’t succeeded.”

As for the “Committee to Aid the Starving”¹, you’re also mistaken. They should have been arrested. Nulans deserved a good thrashing.

Are you receiving treatment seriously and systematically? This is essential. We must establish this rigorously. Please respond.

Of course, we must assist English communists—though we must do so with the strictest possible secrecy. We must teach them how the Bolsheviks always worked. We should provide them with the most practical guidance—by publishing their writings (or better yet, by finding an intermediary and having them publish in his name, carefully revising their article drafts as needed).

Have you seen Cedar & Eden Paul? Is there no way to work through them? Is Price’s useful book, “My Recollections of the Russian Revolution,” progressing well? Why isn’t Reed’s “Ten Days That Shook the World” being republished in England? Nor Frey’s “The Proletarian Revolution in Russia”?²

We must teach English communists—again and again—to work as the Bolsheviks did: teaching them through articles, and ensuring that such instruction is delivered publicly, in print. We can draw upon the resolutions of the Third Congress of the Communist International regarding party work.

With communist greetings,

Lenin.

8/IX/1921

P.S. From time to time, please gather up valuable articles and pamphlets and send them to me.

Lenin.

Fund 2, Inventory 1, File 24694 – autograph.

1V.I. Lenin was writing about the All‑Russian Committee to Aid the Starving, established on July 21, 1921, by S.N. Prokopovich, E.D. Kuskova, and N.M. Kishkin—figures who stood in opposition to Soviet power. By resolution of the All‑Union Central Executive Committee, the committee was dissolved on August 27, 1921, and its members were arrested on charges of anti‑Soviet agitation. In the wake of this, the Central Committee to Aid the Starving was established under the auspices of the All‑Union Central Executive Committee.

As is evident from Lenin’s letter, Berzin had doubts about the necessity of employing repressive measures against the committee’s members.

2See also Doc. 320.