LENIN. ---LETTERS TO GORKY.

You are immediately able to see it from such a side, in such manifestations, in such forms, which more than once in the history of Russia and Western Europe have driven intellectual faint-hearts to despair over the working-class movement and Social-Democracy. I am confident that this will not happen with you, and after talking with Mikhail I feel like firmly shaking your hand. With your talent as an artist you have brought such enormous benefit to the working-class movement of Russia—and not only Russia—you will bring so much more benefit, that under no circumstances is it permissible for you to give yourself over to the heavy moods evoked by episodes of the émigré struggle. There are conditions when the life of the working-class movement inevitably gives rise to this émigré struggle and splits, and squabbling, and factional infighting—not because the working-class movement is internally weak or Social-Democracy internally erroneous, but because the elements from which the working class has to forge its own party are too heterogeneous and disparate. It will forge it in any case, it will forge an excellent revolutionary Social-Democracy in Russia, it will forge it sooner than it sometimes seems from the standpoint of the accursed émigré situation, it will forge it more surely than it appears if one judges by certain external manifestations and isolated episodes. People like Mikhail are a guarantee of that. I firmly shake the hand of both you and Maria Fyodorovna, for now I have hope that you and I will meet again not as enemies. Wl. Ilianoff. Your Lenin. 4. Rue Marie Rose. 4. Paris XIV.

x) Mikhail or Mikhail Zavodskoy—the worker Nikifor Efremovich Vilonov. Died in Davos on 1 May (N.S.) 1910, at the age of 27, of tuberculosis. N. E. Vilonov—son of a joiner from the Kaluga railway workshops—was born in 1885. Having graduated from a technical railway school, Vilonov went to work in the Kiev railway workshops. There he came under the influence of the Social-Democrats and in 1902, as a youth of 19, joined the local Social-Democratic organisation. Later Comrade Vilonov worked in Ekaterinoslav, from where he ended up in exile in Yenisei, escaped, worked in Kazan, Samara, in the Urals (in Ekaterinburg). There he was arrested and put in the “notorious” Nikolaev disciplinary battalions, from which he escaped on 10 October 1905, but unsuccessfully. Then he was freed under the manifesto of 17 October. Vilonov again worked continuously in Samara, Moscow. In October 1908 Comrade Vilonov went abroad. There he worked on a philosophical book, which, however, he did not manage to finish, and at the same time worked energetically on organising the party school (on Capri). Excerpts from his report on the school were published in Proletary, Nos. 47–48 for 1909 (for more details see Sotsial-Demokrat, No. 14 of 22/5 July 1910, and also in the present collection, p. 423, “Milestones in the Life of Vladimir Ilyich,” 1909, point 2.

2) This refers to the faction of otzovists-ultimatists (Vperyodists).