Letter to Grigori Shklovsky, Between September 26 and 28, 1911

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Dear Comrade,

I have received your letter and replied by telegram.

To avoid any misunderstandings, here are a few more details. What I meant was a public lecture (“Stolypin and the Revolution”), with the admission fees to go for the benefit of Rabochaya Gazeta (of course there is no need, or at any rate it’s not obligatory, to say in the advertisement for whose benefit it is).[1] The presiding committee (or the chairman) at the meeting must be from among local Bolsheviks, and by no means “elected” (to avoid intrigues and scandals, to which the liquidators are very prone).

I am willing to have a talk with pro-Party people ( Plekhanovites), but not with Golosists. It would be best of all to confine the audience to Bolsheviks.

I hope to arrive on Thursday; I will send you a telegram about the time of arrival, if I can manage it.

Please be kind enough to send this letter at once to Gorin [M. Gorine. Rue du Pont Neuf. 2. (Chez M-me Vire) Genève], to enable him to take steps to organise a similar lecture at Geneva on Saturday, and to reply to me through you by Thursday.

All the best,

Lenin

As regards literature for the lecture, please get together for me (ι) a file of the CO, (β) Two Parties, (γ) Dnevnik, (δ) Arkomed.[2]

  1. ↑ Lenin read his lecture, “Stolypin and the Revolution”, in Berne on September 28, 1911, and in Geneva on October 3, 1911.
  2. ↑ A reference to the newspaper Sotsial-Demokrat; L. B. Kamenev’s pamphlet Two Parties, with Lenin’s preface (see present edition, Vol. 17, pp. 225–28); G. V. Plekhanov’s Dnevnik Sotsial-Demokrata; and S. T. Arkomed’s book The Labour Movement and Social-Democracy in the Caucasus, Part One, with G. V. Plekhanov’s preface, Geneva, 1910.