Letter to Karl and Rebecca Grünstein, April 12, 1928

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Our Correspondents

Dear Friends:

Your letter of March 24 was received today, April 12. This is a relatively acceptable length of time for mail delivery. Sometimes it's much worse. On the day I received the telegram from you, I sent you a postcard. I hope you received it. Your letter is especially good in that it gives a rather clear picture of your living conditions. Unfortunately it is not a very cheerful or comforting picture. I gather that obstacles are being placed in your way in regard to correspondence and in regard to fishing and hunting. If that is so, it is undoubtedly a case of local authorities acting on their own. It was the same for us here at first. But after protest telegrams were sent to Moscow the situation changed. I think that you must resolutely protest senseless interference of every kind.

The arrival of the mail is the high point of our day, just as it is for you in Cherdyn. During the first few weeks there was no mail at all. We sent postcards and telegrams to all the friends' addresses that we then knew. Your address was one of the last to reach us. Gradually we began to receive answers, at first by telegraph and then by mail. Rakovsky and Sosnovsky write most regularly of all. We have managed to exchange several letters with them already. Besides that Rakovsky sends me foreign newspapers from Astrakhan. I have begun to receive foreign newspapers from Moscow as well, along with books …

From I. N. Smirnov we have already had a letter from his place of residence, that is, Novo-Bayazet in Armenia. His hole-in-the-wall sounds as though it could compete with Cherdyn, although it is located at the other end of the map. From Serebryakov we have received only a postcard. He is working on the Turkestan-Siberia Railway and is well situated but complains of boredom. There was a card from Radek. He is reading and working a lot, complains of kidney trouble. (He did not write us about that himself; his wife did.) There was a letter from Beloborodov (from Ust-Kulom in the Komi autonomous region). In that exile colony it is hard to get candles and kerosene. Valentinov lives there too. There was a letter from Ishchenko from Kainsk, 37 Kraskov Street. He has a job there and complains that the extreme red tape robs him of all the time he wanted to spend on his own projects. Ishchenko wrote under the fresh impression of Pyatakov's extremely stupid letter [capitulating to Stalin], which aroused Ishchenko's great indignation. We received a very cheerful letter from Kasparova from Kurgan (109 Sovietskaya St.). It seems that Kasparova's son has also been exiled from Moscow, according to what they write to our son. Thus far there have been only two telegrams from Mrachkovsky (Veliky Ustyug, Kurochkin Street). In the second telegram received only a few day ago he complains of not receiving any letters from me, although I wrote the first letter to him back on February 28, that is more than a month ago. N. I. Muralov is working in a district planning office (town of Tara, 3 Fourier St.). We have received two letters from him. There was also a letter from Preobrazhensky from Uralsk (13 Nekrasov Square). Preobrazhensky is also doing government work, side by side with a former member of the Central Committee of the Right SRs – Timofeyev. He is doing a lot of theoretical work. Incidentally, right now he's in Moscow because he has had a son born there … I have written to Smilga in Narym several times and received a telegram from him and a group of comrades located in the same area, but no letter from there as yet (Kolpashevo postal district, Narym). There was also a telegram from Vrachev, in Vologda, and from Yushkin and Drozdov, in Andizhan. The telegram was sent while they were en route [to their place of exile]. Eltsin is in Ust-Vym (in the Komi region). Comrade Sermuks ended up there also. We received a telegram from him in the last few days. That seems to be all of the comrades with whom we have established, or are in the process of establishing, correspondence. With the exception of Moscow. Today at the same time your letter came we received a letter from Rakovsky. He's doing a lot of work in the provincial planning commission and a lot of literary work. He's working on the topic of Saint-Simonism for the Institute of Marx and Engels. In addition he's working on his own memoirs. That seems to be all the most important information that I can pass on to you briefly about our friends at this point.

I am working on the postwar decade. The long-term aim of this work is to draw the generalized lessons of the postwar international revolutionary struggle, based on an assessment of the main trends in postwar economics and politics. Part of the material I brought with me. My younger son will have to bring the rest of the books. We are expecting him to arrive here within the next few weeks. Besides that I'm translating Marx's pamphlet on Karl Vogt from German and I'm planning to translate a small book by the British Utopian socialist Hodgkin for the Marx and Engels Institute's publishing house.

As for our domestic arrangements, they are fairly pleasant, especially in comparison with other friends. My health was fairly good until I caught cold recently. Now I have bronchitis in the wake of the grippe. But it seems I'm already on the mend. Things are not so well with Natalya Ivanovna. She has had a relapse of malaria, which is very widespread in this region. The sanitary conditions are terrible. The local doctor suspects that I too have malaria, not just the grippe. We have big hopes for the summer season when we can go up into the hills some eight versts [five miles] from the city, where there are orchards and summer houses (dachas) – more accurately, summer barracks. The climate there is incomparably better. It's cool there in the summer and the malaria hardly reaches that high. We can move to a summer house in early May.

I am enclosing a report on our hunting expeditions written for the hunting comrades Preobrazhensky and Muralov, and for the candidate hunter Rakovsky. The hunting season is now over. We have to wait until the first of August. In the meantime we are getting ready to fish. We will send timely reports on our successes or failures. I hope that you too will have the chance to put your hunting and fishing tools to work.