Date: 1922-04-12
Source: ru:PSS/v54

Source: PSS, Volume 54

1) To the Editorial Board of Pravda
Copies to: 2) Comrade Steklov

3) To Rykov and Tsyurupa

Comrade Osinsky!

I warmly welcome your article in today’s Pravda, “New Insights from Local Experience.” We…

To N. OSINSKY. April 12, 1922

What we lack most are precisely articles of this kind—and I believe that every People’s Commissariat ought to “appoint” a publicist (closely aligned with the work of the Commissariat and its head) tasked with conducting such reviews.

The worst problem we face is the excessive proliferation of abstract generalizations in the press and the relentless political rhetoric, coupled with a profound dearth of genuine engagement with local experience. Both at the grassroots level and at the highest echelons, powerful tendencies conspire to obstruct the honest disclosure and truthful assessment of local realities. They fear to bring the dirt out of the house; they recoil from the stark truth, dismissing it with a cursory “a glance and nothing more”—in short, indulging in superficial, armchair analyses, as Comrade Trotsky aptly put it.

We must strive for ever greater specificity in our study of local experience—attending to details, to the minutiae, to practical matters and to the concrete realities of everyday life: to the district level, to the volost, to the rural communities themselves. We must scrutinize where, to whom, and why—by what means—it is possible, despite abysmal poverty and widespread ruin, to achieve real, albeit modest, improvements. We must not shy away from exposing errors and shortcomings; instead, we should energetically promote and publicize, by every available means, every locally distinguished worker who stands out in some way, holding them up as models for others to emulate. The more we engage in this kind of work, the deeper we immerse ourselves in living practice—diverting both our own attention and that of our readers away from the foul, bureaucratic air of Moscow (and indeed, from the intellectually pretentious atmosphere of the Soviet bureaucracy as a whole)—the more successfully we will advance not only the quality of our press but also the overall progress of our entire socialist construction.

Once again, I salute your initiative and sincerely hope that you will continue along this path, expanding it further and delving even deeper in the same direction.

With comradely greetings, Lenin

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First published in an incomplete form

February 17, 1956, in the newspaper Pravda, No. 48

Published in full on April 22, 1956, in Pravda, No. 113

Printed from the original manuscript