Letter to Grigori Zinoviev, October 5, 1916

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Author(s) Lenin
Written 5 October 1916


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Written in October, not later than 5th, 1916
Published: First published in 1964 in Collected Works, Fifth (Russian) Ed., Vol. 49. Sent from Zurich to Hertenstein. Printed from the original.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1977, Moscow, Volume 43, pages 573c-574.
Keywords : Grigori Zinoviev, Letter

I am sending your article.[1] Now that’s felicitous! Should we not add two things?

(1.) that the Germans have their defeatists, of whom history will have its say (remember Seger’s story and Bloch);

(2) about the shabby trick played on us by Gazeta Robotnicza in regard to defeatism.

As regards the I.S.B., I think it better to wait for an invitation!

I see Avanti! but I don’t follow it closely. Couldn’t George give the exact No. and date?

(Wasn’t that the meeting of parliamentarians, of which, if I am not mistaken, there was talk at Kienthal?)

The parliamentarians are all Kautskyites, you know.

Since Alexander has already been set up—we are in a bit of a dilemma. What’s to be done?

I just can’t cut Strannik! I have read it twice!! I can’t read it any more.

I shall send you my reply to Yuri in a day or two.[2]

Should not more explicit arrangements be made with Paris first?

Won’t it be a fiasco if we start sending and won’t be able to keep it up regularly?

I am as mad as the devil with Grisha for his unpunctuality and imprecision: I can’t make sense out of his letters! Sends silly telegrams!

In Zurich there’s absolutely nobody to do the copying.

Best regards,

Lenin

There should be a secret letter from Grisha one of these days? Isn’t that so?

  1. ↑ Lenin is here commenting on Zinoviev’s article “ ‘Defeatism’ Before and Now”. It was published in the first issue of Sbornik Sotsial-Demokrata. Lenin’s remarks were accepted by Zinoviev only in part.
    Point 2 of Lenin’s letter refers to the publication in Gazeta Robotnicza No. 25 for 1916 of the Resolution of a Meeting of the Editorial Board, held June 1–2, 1915. The resolution attacked the slogan of defeat of the tsarist monarchy which the CC of the RSDLP put forward at the beginning of the war, on the grounds that it put “an argument into the hands of the German social-patriots”.
  2. ↑ A reference to “Reply to P. Kievsky (Y. Pyatakov)” (see present edition, Vol. 23, pp. 22–27).—Ed.
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