IN ST. PETERSBURG 

London, 24 November 1894 
41 Regent’s Park Road, N. W. 

My dear Sir, 

I am in possession of your kind letters 7 and 11 June, 15 October and 12 
November. 

Of Mr. Struve’s works I have only seen the article in Braun’s 
Centralblatt,“ and cannot therefore speak as to what assertions he may have 
made. If in my letters you find any facts that may be useful to you in your 
reply, you are welcome to make use of them. **° But as to any opinions of 
mine, I am afraid, your opponents—not perhaps Mr. Struve but the Russian 
press generally—would use them in a way they do not warrant. I am daily 
and weekly assailed by Russian friends to reply to Russian reviews and 
books in which the words of our author? are not only misinterpreted but 
misquoted and where they say my interference would suffice to set the 
matter right. I have constantly declined doing so, because I cannot, without 
giving up real and serious work, be dragged into controversies going on in a 
faraway country, in a language which I do not yet read with as much ease as 
the better known western languages, and in a literature whereof at best I but 
see occasional fragments and where it is utterly impossible for me to follow 
the debate closely and in all its phases and passages. There are people 
everywhere who, in order to defend a position once taken up by them, do not 
shrink from any distortion or unfair manoeuvre; and if this is the case with 
the writings of our author, I am afraid I should get no better treatment and be 
compelled, finally, to interfere in the debate, both for other people’s sake and 
my own. In fact, if my 

“ P. Struve, ‘Zur Beurtheilung der kapitalistischen Entwickelung Russlands’, 
Sozialpolitisches Centralblatt, No. 1, 2 October 1893 - > Karl Marx 

opinions as stated in private letters, did appear in the Russian press with my 
sanction, I should then have no defence via-d-vis my Russian friends here 
and on the Continent, who urge me actively to interfere in Russian debates 
and to set this or that man right on this and that point; I should not have any 
valid reason to decline, as they would be able to tell me: you have already 
once interfered in Russian debates; you must own that our present case is 
quite as important as that of Mr. D., so if you please, treat us as you have 
treated him. And then, my time would be no longer my own, and my 
interference in Russian debates would after all be extremely inefficacious 
and incomplete. 

These are the reasons which compel me, to my very great regret, to request 
you, not to insist on quoting opinions of mine, at least not as mine. 

I will try to forward to you some continuation of what you have already 
received." 

Yours very truly 

L.K°