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Special pages :
Letter to Georgy Chicherin, January 26, 1922
Published: First published in 1959 in Lenin Miscellany XXXVI. Printed from secretarial notes (typewritten copy).
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1976, Moscow, Volume 45, page 451b and 452b
Comrade Chicherin:
1. Please send me, if possible, the official text of Bonomi’s proposals in the language in which you have received it (it is important for me to have the text of the provisions as formulated by them).[1]
2. Do you know if any influential Entente newspaper has carried the text of Clause 1 of these terms, which was initially published in our newspapers, namely: with the words “system of property” and not just “system”, as, I believe, the official text sent, by Bonomi puts it.[2]
I should also ask you to have the Russian Telegraph Agency’s Foreign Press Service check up whether the words “system of property” have appeared in any foreign newspaper, and if they have, to let me have the issue.
Lenin
26/I.1922.
Comrade Chicherin:
Do you remember sending me Sun Yat-sen’s letter?
The one in which he said something about his friendship for me, and you asked me whether I knew him?
Was the letter addressed to you or to me?[3]
Have you got it in the archives? and my reply with your inquiry?
If you do, could you send it to me (addressed to Fotieva)?
If not, what do you remember about it?
With communist greetings,
Lenin
- ↑ A reference to the radio telegram from the Chairman of the Council of Ministers of Italy, Bonomi, on January 13, 1922, in which, under a decision of the conference of the Allied Supreme Council, held at Cannes from January 6 to 13, he invited, on behalf of the Supreme Council, a Soviet Government delegation to take part in an international economic and financial conference which was to meet at Genoa in early March 1922.
- ↑ Clause 1 of the Cannes resolution, as published in the Soviet press, said: “No state can claim any right to dictate to another state the principles on which the latter is to regulate its system of ownership, and internal economy and government” (Izvestia VTsIK No. 6, January 10, 1922). This text corresponded with the text of the resolution published in Petit Parisien No. 16385 on January 8. On January 26, G. V. Chicherin wrote, enclosing the issue of the paper: “I am sending you Petit Parisien with the Cannes resolution and a copy of Bonomi. The latter has dropped ‘Système de propriété’.”
Lenin attached great importance to the formulation of § 1 of the Cannes terms, regarding it as an indirect admission of the bankruptcy of the capitalist system of property, and of the inevitable existence of a communist system of property alongside it. Lenin pointed out that the other paragraphs of the Cannes terms, designed to enslave Soviet Russia by foreign capital, were clearly at odds with clause one (see present edition, Vol. 33, pp. 356–57). - ↑ A reference to Sun Yat-sen’s letter of August 28, 1921, addressed to G. V. Chicherin, informing him of the situation in China, and of Sun’s election to the post of President of the National Government. He ended by saying: “I am taking a great interest in your cause, especially in the organisation of your Soviets, your Army and education. I should like to know everything you and others may tell me about these things, especially about education. Like Moscow, I should like to lay the foundations of the Chinese Republic deep in the minds of the young generation—the toilers of the morrow.
“With best wishes to you, to ray friend Lenin and to all those who have done so much for the cause of human freedom” (see Bolshevik No. 19, 1950, pp. 46–48). Having sent on this letter to Lenin on November 6, 1921. Chicherin asked him whether he was personally acquainted with Sun Yat-sen. Lenin replied the next day, saying that they had never met, and that until then they had not corresponded.