Letter to Alexander Shliapnikov, December, 11, 1914

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Dear Friend,

I received your letter with the news of your departure (on Sunday, today is Friday) for Copenhagen.

Write (1) whence your news and the rumours that you have conveyed? From what sources? Who brought them?

(2) Do you now have your own sources? At least one address in St. Petersburg? Or not? Is code and invisible ink being used with anybody or with nobody at all just now?

If there are no contacts, can you establish them?

If not, let’s think how and through whom we can do it. Further, did you get in touch with Litvinov in London?

Belenin’s speech at the Swedish congress came off wonderfully.[1] As for making a speech in Copenhagen (at the January 1915 conference),[2] let us start discussing this by letter straightaway.

Yours,

Lenin

Uljanow. Distelweg. 11. Berne (Suisse).

  1. At the Congress of the Swedish Social-Democratic Party = (see Note 354) the main item on the agenda dealt with the attitude towards the war. A. G. Shlyapnikov, who brought the Congress a message of greetings from the RSDLP’s Central Committee, read a declaration calling for struggle against the imperialist war and branding the treachery of the leaders of the German Social-Democrats and the socialist parties of other countries, who had turned social-chauvinist. The Congress was reported in Sotsial-Demokrat No. 36, for January 9, 1915.
  2. This refers to the projected conference of socialists of the neutral countries sponsored by Pieter Troelstra and Thorvald Stauning. The conference was held in Copenhagen January 17–18, 1915, and was attended by delegates from the socialist parties of Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Holland. It adopted a resolution calling upon the Social-Democratic parties of the neutral countries to urge their governments to mediate between the belligerents for the speedy restoration of peace. Some of the Social-Democratic parties submitted to the conference their declarations on the attitude towards the war. From the CC of the RSDLP the conference was handed issue No. 33 of Sotsial-Demokrat containing the Manifesto “The War and Russian Social-Democracy” and a government report concerning the arrest of the Bolshevik deputies of the Duma.