To Comrades Bukharin and Zinoviev:
We must carefully consider in advance which of our most resolute comrades will represent the Comintern at the conference with the Second and Second½ Internationals—No. 163. Likewise, we must deliberate in advance on the principal questions of tactics and strategy to be addressed at this meeting.
The agenda for the conference must be thought through well in advance and drawn up only after full consultation with each of the participating parties. On our side, we should include in this agenda only those issues that pertain directly to the practical, joint action of the working masses in areas where there is undisputed agreement among the official statements issued by the press of all three active parties. We must thoroughly explain why, in the interests of a united front, we limit ourselves to such questions. Should the “yellow” gentlemen attempt to raise contentious political issues—such as the question of relations with the Mensheviks, or matters concerning Georgia, and the like—we must adopt the following tactical approach: 1) state that the agenda can be finalized only by unanimous decision of all three participating parties; 2) declare that we have compiled our own list of questions guided exclusively by the imperative of achieving unity among the working masses in action—a unity that could be realized immediately, even in the presence of fundamental political differences; 3) affirm that we are fully prepared to discuss questions regarding relations with the Mensheviks, with Georgia, and with any other issues put forward by the Second and Second½ Internationals—provided, however, that these latter parties agree to raise the following questions in turn: 1) the question of the Second and Second½ Internationals’ renegade stance toward the Basel Manifesto; 2) the question of how those same parties participated in the assassination of Luxemburg, Liebknecht, and other German communists—through the very bourgeois governments that these parties themselves support; 3) the question of how these same parties similarly condoned the murder of revolutionary fighters in the colonies, carried out by bourgeois parties that the Second and Second½ Internationals continue to back—and so forth, ad infinitum. We must prepare such lists of questions—and similar ones—in advance, and likewise draft in advance the key theses and designate the speakers for several of the most critical issues of this kind.
We must find an appropriate occasion to officially declare that we regard the Second and Second½ Internationals not as anything other than inconsistent, vacillating participants in a bloc with the counterrevolutionary world bourgeoisie—and that we are entering into the united-front conference in order to achieve, as far as possible, practical unity in the immediate actions of the masses, while also exposing the political fallacies underlying the entire stance of the Second and Second½ Internationals. Just as those latter parties (the Second and Second½) come to the conference with us in the interest of fostering practical unity in the immediate actions of the masses and in the interest of politically exposing the errors inherent in our own position.
Lenin
Dictated over the telephone on February 1, 1922.
First published in 1959 in Lenin Collection XXXVI.

Printed from the secretary’s record (a typewritten copy).