# TO G. V. PLEKHANOV

Highly esteemed Georgy Valentinovich!

I am addressing you with this letter because I am convinced that the question of the necessity of uniting Social-Democracy has already definitively matured, and its possibility is especially great precisely now. Two reasons have compelled me not to delay any longer in directly appealing to you: 1) the founding in Petersburg of the legal S.-D. newspaper *Novaya Zhizn* and 2) the events of recent days. Even if these events do not lead very quickly to our return to Russia, in any case that return is now quite, quite near, and the S.-D. newspaper provides an immediate basis for the most serious common work.

That we, the Bolsheviks, passionately desire to work together with you, I hardly need repeat to you. I have written to Petersburg that all the editors of the new newspaper (for now there are seven of them: Bogdanov, Rumyantsev, Bazarov, Lunacharsky, Orlovsky, Olminsky, and myself) should appeal to you with a collective and official request to join the editorial board.

But events do not wait, the mail has been interrupted, and I do not consider myself entitled to postpone a necessary step for the sake of one, essentially, formality. In substance, I am fully and unconditionally confident of general agreement and joy at such a proposal. I know perfectly well that all Bolsheviks have always regarded the divergence with you as something temporary, caused by exceptional circumstances. There is no

dispute that the struggle often carried us away into such steps, statements, and pronouncements that could not but hinder a future union, but the readiness to unite, the awareness of the extreme abnormality of the fact that the best force of Russian S.-D. stands aside from the work, the awareness of the extreme necessity for the entire movement of your guiding, close, direct participation—all this we have always had. And we all firmly believe that if not today, then tomorrow, if not tomorrow, then the day after, our union with you will nonetheless take place, despite all difficulties and obstacles.

But it is better that this be today than tomorrow. Matters have now turned in such a way that one can be late, and we intend to exert every effort not to be late.

Will you wish to work together with us? I would be extraordinarily glad if you agreed that we meet the two of us and talk on this theme. I am confident that in a personal meeting many misunderstandings would be eliminated, many seeming difficulties for the cause of unification would immediately fall away. But in case you do not agree in general or do not agree now, I will permit myself to touch in advance upon some of these difficulties.

The difficulties are as follows: 1) Your disagreements with many members of the new editorial board. 2) Your unwillingness to enter into one of the two halves of Social-Democracy. — The first difficulty, it seems to me, is entirely removable. Our agreement with you concerns approximately 9/10 of questions of theory and tactics, and it is not worthwhile to diverge over 1/10. You wanted and want to correct certain erroneous, in your view, assertions in my works.

But I have nowhere and never attempted to bind anyone among the Social-Democrats specifically to my views, and no one, absolutely no one from the new editorial board has committed himself to any "Leninists." Barsov's speech at the Third Congress expresses in this regard the general views. You consider erroneous the philosophical views of three*

* Referring to A. A. Bogdanov, V. A. Bazarov, and A. V. Lunacharsky. — Ed.