Letter to Kartavtsev, August 4, 1902

Add a subpage to this text

Read the help page for usage.

 

Identity not established.—Ed.

4/VIII.

1) I received two more letters from you but could not make them out. Your invisible ink is not concentrated enough. Try it out each time before writing. It is terribly annoying to get a letter and not be able to read it.

2) Did you get our letter asking you to send us some 300 rubles out of our money?

3) What have you heard from prison?

4) Illg’s address. You have it wrong, it should be:

5) Let us know what’s doing in the committee. It is said that a certain “Leonty” (Potyomkin) has arrived in Berlin. He is supposed to have told a Berlin comrade of ours that a) the Kiev Committee is stripping the “Stariki’s supporters” of all authority, b) that it is indignant about the Iskra letter and will oppose the recognition of Iskra as the Party organ, c) that the committee had instructed him to contact Zhizn, which the Kiev people want to make the Party organ, d) that the committee is powerless to counteract the Socialist-Revolutionaries, does not venture to come out against terrorism and merely seeks to oppose the circulation of literature such as The Ways People Live and the like. There is probably something wrong here and we have asked word to be passed on to Leonty that be should write us and give us a detailed account of what is happening. But he has not written. Let us know how things stand.

We earnestly beg you to contact us directly on all matters of any importance, for passing on information through Berlin, etc., always confuses things terribly. We believe that in this case too there has been some mix-up. When giving assignments to people going abroad they must be told not to confine themselves to seeing one or another League member but to contact the Editorial Board without fail either in person or by writing themselves (i.e., not leaving it to some League member to do)—registered letters from abroad to the Dietz and other addresses are quite safe. This is necessary because the members of the League and even members of its administration are scattered all over Europe and do not know much about contacts with Russia.

We still haven’t got the address for contacting you. It was probably in one of the letters we could not make out, but there’s nothing we can do about it. We are waiting for your reply.

Please put us in touch with Vakar