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Special pages :
Letter to Inessa Armand, January 22, 1917
Frist letter[edit source]
Published for the first time in the Fourth (Russian) Edition of the Collected Works. Sent from Zurich to Clarens (Switzerland). Printed from the original.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1976, Moscow, Volume 35, pages 275-276.
Dear Friend,
Your lecture was yesterday, and I am impatiently waiting for news of how it went off. When I got your express letter on Thursday, I hurried to Radek at the other end of the town and collected some cuttings from him. I wanted very much to write you a long letter on pacifism (an extremely important subject in general, a basic one from the point of view of the whole international situation today, about which I wrote in the article[1] --I have received it, merci!—and lastly a particularly important subject for Switzerland). But I did not manage it: both on Thursday and on Friday we had meetings of the Lefts.
Things have gone badly for the Lefts here, because Nobs and Platten have become frightened of a war against Grimm, who furiously attacked the referendum[2] and frightened our young friends!! Sad!! In Berne, judging from Grigory’s letters, things are better. Radek, at my insistence, has written a little pamphlet against the “Centre” here and Grimm, but yesterday the “Lefts” defeated (!!) the plan that it should be published by the Lefts: they have been frightened by the fright of Nobs and Platten. What warriors! What Lefts!
I think you should consider your lecture last night a rehearsal, and make ready to repeat it in Geneva and La Chaux-de-Fonds. It is worth working up this subject, and lecturing on it more than once. It will do the Swiss a tremendous lot of good. Write in as much detail as possible how you put the question, what arguments you advanced, what objections you met, etc.
Have the draft resolutions for the Swiss Congress on defence of the fatherland and the question of the war been translated into French? I mean translation in the press: Grütlianer, Sentinelle, etc. Or not?
It would be well to arrange for their translation, if it has not been done, and to think about agitation and propaganda.
Probably this question will go ahead in connection with your visit to Chaux-de-Fonds. I shall await news from you.
Abramovich is working wonderfully, and he should be supported in every possible way.
All possible greetings.
Yours, Lenin
P.S. Trotsky has sent in a silly letter. We shall neither print it nor reply to him.
Has any campaign begun in the press of French Switzerland about (1) the referendum and (2) the resolutions on the war question for the Congress? Or is there no campaign? Do you see, and regularly, Volksrecht and Berner Tagwacht? This is essential now; we have to help the Swiss Lefts.
Did I write to you that Guilbeaux refused to sign the resolution against Grimm? (Or maybe you have heard this already from Grigory?) He’s not up to much, our Guilbeaux; he’s afraid of a war with Grimm, he’s afraid of Sokolnikov, who is afraid of a split; he’s afraid of Merrheim, who is afraid of “Monsieur” Jouhaux!! Well, what warriors!! I want to write about this to Olga.
Second letter[edit source]
First published in 1964 in Collected Works, Fifth (Russian) Ed., Vol. 49. Sent from Zurich to Clarens. Printed from the original.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1977, Moscow, Volume 43, pages 605b-606.
Dear Friend,
I received the translation. Thanks awfully. I have sent it on.[3]
As regards the censorship to which you have subjected my French article,[4] I am surprised, really. As you did not send me the original, aid I would hardly undertake a French translation myself, I sent it, of course, as you suggested, omitting the passage about Engels.
“The mere thought that I am defending Engels’s point of view on war and on the stand the Germans took at the time, makes your blood boil and you cannot translate it....”
Well, well! I am surprised! We, Grigory and I, quoted this passage—more than passage: statement, declaration of Engels—many times, directly and indirectly, in 1914 and 1915.
Engels, it should be remembered, wrote this first for the French socialists and it was published in their Almanach du Parti Ouvrier.[5] At that time the French did not protest, feeling—if not realising clearly—that the war of Boulanger+Alexander III against Germany of those days would be anti-democratic only on their part, but on the part of Germany (of whose imperialism there could be no question at the time!!) it would really be only “defence”, really a war for national existence.
And now, what the French themselves acknowledged in 1891 to be correct, you suddenly cry down, and how! And just before that, at a meeting of the Swiss Lefts, they (semi pacifists, what can you do?) dismissed my reference to this statement of Engels’s with amazing frivolity of their own peculiar brand.
You did not say anything either about my article in reply to Kievsky.
My work with the Swiss Lefts, like my reflections on the absurdities which Radek has talked himself into, convince me more and more that on the vital question of motives for rejecting defence of the fatherland our stand is the only correct one. Have you seen No. 6 of Jugend-Internationale, of which I wrote in Sb. No. 2 (did you get it?) and Arbeiterpolitik No. 25?[6]
I have received a postcard from Kamenev. I shall send it to you. Olga writes that things are looking up with the Lefts, that an organisation of Zimmerwald Lefts, French+ Italian (!! I am ever so pleased about this)+Russian, has been founded and that Guilbeaux will write to me about it (I shall forward it on to you, if you like). I try to follow Avanti! and am becoming convinced that Souvarine is right: Turati is quite a Kautskyite and he is switching the whole Italian socialist parliamentary group (into these lines. His last speech (17.I) is smart: he’s a smart alec of bourgeois pacifism, and not a socialist at all.
I wish you the very, very best,
Yours,
Lenin
- ↑ Reference is apparently to the article “Bourgeois Pacifism and Socialist Pacifism” (see present edition, Vol. 23, pp. 175–94).—Ed.
- ↑ The referendum was on the question of holding an extraordinary congress of the Swiss Social-Democratic Party to discuss the attitude to be adopted to militarism and war. The referendum was declared by the Swiss Left Social-Democrats in connection with the decision of the Executive of the Swiss Social-Democratic Party to postpone the congress indefinitely.
- ↑ See Document 544 in this volume.—Ed.
- ↑ See “An Open Letter to Boris Souvarine” (present edition, Vol. 23, pp. 195–204).—Ed.
- ↑ See F. Engels, “Socialism in Germany” (“Der Sozialismus in Deutschland”, Marx/Engels, Werke, Bd. 22, Dietz Verlag, Berlin, 1963, S. 252–60).
- ↑ No. 6 of the journal Jugend-Internationale, which came out on December 1, 1916, carried an article by Bukharin (over the signature “Note Bene”) entitled “The Imperialist Robber State”. A criticism of this article will be found in Lenin’s “The Youth International” published in Sbornik Sotsial-Demokrata No. 2 (see present edition, Vol. 23, pp. 163–66).
This article of Bukharin’s, slightly abbreviated, was published in Arbeiterpolitik No. 25, December 9, 1916, under the heading “The Imperialist State”.