Letter to Camille Huysmans, November 10, 1912

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10.XI.

Dear Comrade Huysmans,

I am very grateful to you for your communication.[1] We shall try to take steps to appoint delegates to the Basle Congress.

Our Party’s representative in the committee to edit the draft resolution will be named at the earliest possible date.

With fraternal greetings,

N. Lenin

P.S. I must submit to the CC of our Party a report on the last session of the Bureau. To draw up the report I need some information. I know very well that you are extremely busy, dear comrade, and would ask you to give five or ten minutes of your time to Comrade Popov, who will call on you. The French and German newspapers (Le Peuple, Wiener Arbeiter-Zeitung, Bremer Bürger-Zeitung, Leipziger Volkszeitung and Vorwärts) published very contradictory information on the last session of the I.S.B.[2]

P.P.S. I received the news of the election of deputies to the Fourth Duma from Moscow Gubernia only today. I can now report that all the deputies from the workers’ curia (Arbeiterkurie) are Social-Democrats! Twelve Social-Democrats have already been elected despite the most outrageous rigging of the elections.

With fraternal greetings,

N. Lenin

  1. Huysmans had written Lenin on November 7, 1912, letting him know when the Basle congress was to open and asking him to attend to the appointment of delegates; informing him of the demonstrations expected to take place in the big European cities on November 17, 1912, against the extension of the theatre of hostilities; asking him to agree to speak at a meeting if invited to do so by any of the parties; informing him of the composition of the resolution committee of the congress, and asking that a representative be appointed to the committee.
  2. A reference to the meeting of the International Socialist Bureau held in Brussels on October 28–29, 1912, which Lenin did not attend. The meeting decided to call an extraordinary socialist congress. Russia was represented by G. Plekhanov and I. Rubanovich. A special closed sitting was held to discuss Russian affairs, but no official report of the sitting was published. Lenin learnt of it from L. Martov’s article “The International Bureau on Social-Democratic Unity”, published in Luch No. 37, October 28, 1912. Lenin replied to Martov in his article “Better Late Than Never” (see present edition, Vol. 18, pp. 469–70).