V. I.

Lenin

637

LETTER TO G. V. CHICHERIN AND ASSIGNMENT TO SECRETARIES

Please show Stalin and Molotov and send on to Chicherin
this reply of mine:

Comrade Chicherin!

You are letting your nerves run away with you. We shall still have time on 22 or 23/11 to discuss the plan of
conduct at Genoa.

You and I have both fought against pacifism as a programme for the revolutionary proletarian party. That much is clear. But who has ever denied the use of pacifists by
that party to soften up the enemy, the bourgeoisie? [1]

Yours,

Lenin

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Notes:
[1]
Written under the text of G. V. Chicherin’s letter of February
15, 1922. With the directives of the R.C.P.(B.) C.C. and Lenin’s
instructions in mind concerning the nature of the programme with
which the Soviet delegation was to come out at the Genoa
Conference (see this volume, Document 623, and also present edition,
Vol. 42, pp. 396–98), Chicherin wrote: “I don’t know how we
shall manage with the ‘broadest programme’. All my life I have
cursed petty-bourgeois illusions, and here is the Politbureau
making me invent petty-bourgeois illusions in my old age. None
of us knows how to compose such things, we don’t even know on
which sources we are to rely. Perhaps you will let us have more
detailed directions?” (Central Party Archives of the Institute of
Marxism-Leninism of the C.P.S.U. Central Committee.)

See also Vol. 42, pp. 401–04.