Letter to Fyodor Dan, March 22, 1901

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March 22, 1901

Many thanks for your letter of March 2 addressed to Rittmeyer. We are very glad that we have at last established correspondence with you (of which I wrote you as far back as July15!). Please observe the rules so that we should always know in any important affair that the letter will reach us. The address you used last time is one of the best: make use of it.

Collect cash. We have now been reduced almost to beggary, and it is a question of life or death for us to obtain a large sum. We shall send you Zarya in a few days. So do everything you can about finance.[1]

How do matters stand with the doctor’s group?[2] Last summer, their representative behaved in a way that was equivalent to a rupture (he made some idiotic demands on us)—but later a member of his group renewed contact with our representative in Berlin.[3] Get some sense out of them: are they willing to help us or not?

Send us an address for delivering a suitcase,[4] and a more reliable one for letters and books.

Yours,

Starik

What about the Finnish routes[5]? We know nothing, and have not had a single letter from you about this. Please, repeat.

If the bearers of a suitcase have no letter from the organisation, then you should not talk freely with them about anything at all.

  1. ↑ The money can be sent through a bank by cheque, in a registered letter addressed to Carl Lehmann (the third letter is a German h), M.D., Gabelsbergerstrasse 20a. Keep this address in mind: it is good for cash, and for letters and books.—Lenin
  2. ↑ The identity of the “doctor’s group” is unknown.
  3. ↑ Iskra’s representative in Berlin was M. G. Vecheslov.
  4. ↑ Illegal Iskra and Zarya literature was transported to Russia in double-bottomed suitcases.
  5. ↑ St. Petersburg League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class was transporting its illegal literature through Finland and Stockholm as early as the end of the 1890s. Transportation was organised by K. H. Branting, a Swedish Social-Democrat, Carder, a Norwegian Social-Democrat, and A. Weidel, a Swedish worker who settled in Finland for that purpose. But Garder’s arrest in 1900 disrupted the arrangement and the route via Finland. A route running from Stockholm to Abo and across the Russian frontier was restarted in 1901.
    In the letter Lenin asks about the results of efforts to resume transportation across Finland.