Dear friend! Please immediately convey to Rahmetov that he is treating us in a positively swinish manner. He cannot imagine to what extent everyone here is waiting for specific, precise, and encouraging messages from him, not the telegrams he sends. The public is utterly exhausted from the constant waiting and uncertainty. It is absolutely impossible that Rahmetov has nothing to write: he sees and has seen a multitude of people, spoken with Zemlyachka, corresponded with Boroda, with Moscow lawyers and writers, and so on and so forth. He must keep us au courant, transmit connections, provide new addresses, send correspondence, and recount business and interesting meetings. Rahmetov has not sent us a single new connection! This is monstrous.

Not a single piece of correspondence, not a single report about the group of writers in Moscow.

If Rahmetov were to fall through tomorrow, we would not be able to use anything, as if he had never lived!! This is outrageous; he could have written everything and about everything without the slightest danger, but he only hinted at some young forces and so on. (What is known about Bazarov, Frich, Suvorov, and others?) At least once a week (honestly, this is not much) he should spend 2-3 hours writing a 10-15 page letter, otherwise, truly, all connections will be broken. Rahmetov and his boundless plans will turn into a boundless fiction, and the local public will scatter, concluding in horror that there is no majority and that the majority will achieve nothing. The tactics of the minority have become completely clear in their new form: complete ignoring and silencing of the literature and existence of the majority, avoiding polemics in the Central Organ, and boasting about positive work (recently, the editorial board of the Central Organ issued a printed, "for party members only" letter to party organizations about the plan for social democrats' participation in the zemstvo campaign: an incredible boast about incredible banalities. Here, Lenin gave a critical review and denunciation of this letter*). The majority must launch its own organ 301: for this, money and correspondence are lacking. Efforts must be intensified on both fronts, and without the most detailed and comprehensive letters, no business can be done. Connections are not being passed on, there is no possibility of attacking the same person from different sides, there is no coordination in the work of the Bolsheviks who travel across Russia, setting up one thing and another separately. This fragmentation is felt in everything, the committees are again lagging behind the situation, partly because they do not know the new resolutions of the Council (appendix to issues 73-74 of "Iskra", a special 10-page leaflet), and partly because they do not delve into them and do not understand that these resolutions amount to the most complete and shameless falsification of the congress. Now only children can fail to see that the Council and the Central Committee will stop at nothing to disrupt the congress. We must counter with strength = organ + organization of the majority in Russia, or else we must die. Lenin has not yet met with Trifler; it is strange that Trifler has gone off to the side and is holding back, waiting!

So, convey to Rahmetov a triple scolding and make him, as punishment, write his diary. Why hasn't Mme. Rahmetova gone where she promised? We repeat: everyone and everything will scatter (even Galerka is groaning and sighing), for there is no sense of any connection with Russia, no sign that

* See "The Zemstvo Campaign and the Plan of 'Iskra'" (Works, 5th ed., vol. 9, pp. 75-98). Ed.

Rahmetov lived, worked for the common cause, was concerned and worried about it. Without letters, there is nothing but complete fragmentation!!