V. I. Lenin

Source: ru:PSS/v46;es:MT
Translated: machine translation (DeepSeek) from the Russian; AI-translated.

FROM OLD MAN HORSE, PERSONAL

In connection with the documents I am sending you (the agreement with Neil 265 and my official letter to the C.C.****) I should like to have a further talk with you, for I do not know whether we shall manage to meet. Your “friend”***** was here recently and gave us hopes of your coming, but Neil contradicted this news. It will be a great pity if you do not come: it would be

* The letter is a postscript to a letter by N. K. Krupskaya. Ed.
** from the C.C. Ed.
*** See V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Fifth Edition, Vol. 8, pp. 185-414. Ed.
**** See ibid., pp. 415-418. Ed.
***** D. S. Postolovsky is meant. Ed.

absolutely necessary in every respect, for there are a host of misunderstandings and they will grow and grow, hampering all work, if we do not manage to meet and have a thorough talk.

Be sure to write and tell me whether you will come and what you think of my pamphlet. In general, as regards letters, you are unpardonably inactive.

Boris (and apparently Konyaga, too) have got stuck, in my opinion, on a manifestly backward point of view.

They are still “living in November”, when squabbling overshadowed everything in our Party struggle, when it was permissible to hope that everything would “settle itself” given a little personal compliance, and so forth. Now that point of view is antiquated, and to stick to it means either being a parrot, repeating the same thing senselessly, or being a political weathercock, or renouncing all leading role and turning into a deaf-and-dumb cabman, a shop assistant. Events have irrevocably destroyed that old point of view. The Martovites are disavowing “co-optation”; the new *Iskra*, full of principled nonsense, has already de facto pushed all squabbling far into the background (so that only parrots can now call for an end to squabbling); the question has been reduced, understand this for heaven’s sake, reduced by the force of events to whether the Party is satisfied with the new *Iskra*. If we do not want to be pawns, we must by all means understand the given situation and work out a plan for a consistent but unyielding principled struggle in the name of Party spirit against circle spirit, in the name of revolutionary principles of organisation against opportunism. It is time to abandon the old bugbears that every such struggle is a split, time to stop hiding one’s head under one’s wing, shielding oneself from one’s Party duties by references to the “positive work”... of cabmen and shop assistants, time to abandon the opinion, which children will soon laugh at, that agitation for a congress is a Lenin intrigue.

I repeat: the members of the C.C. are threatened with the gravest danger of becoming completely backward oddities. Whoever has a drop of political honour and political honesty must stop hedging and being cunning (this

did not succeed even with Plekhanov, let alone our good Boris!), he must take a definite stand and defend his convictions.

I press your hand firmly and await an answer.

Yours,
Lenin