Letter to Lev Kamenev, September 15, 1912

Add a subpage to this text

Read the help page for usage.

 

Dear L. B.,

I am sending you a copy of our reply to Muller (Albert will send the reply from Leipzig tomorrow).

Albert will also send you our reply in the form of a printed leaflet. (Postskriptum to the pamphlet Zur gegenwärtigen Sachlage, etc. ) Circulate this leaflet, as well as the pamphlet, as widely as possible. It must be impressed upon the Germans that before any materials (of the liquidators’ conference) appear in the press and before verification in open discussion in the press, not a single word can be believed.

We hear from Berlin that the liquidators have met with a fiasco. Incidentally, Alexinsky left their conference and threatens exposures.

Write as soon as possible how things are going.

Yours,

Lenin

Postskriptum zu der Schrift Zur gegenwärtigen Sachlage. etc.

Vertraulich ... an die Delegierte des... zum Chemnitzer Parteitag.

Today, September 15, we received through Paris the following letter from the Vorstand which shows the German comrades most strikingly how right we were in protesting against private, unauthorised “informants” who fear to come out openly. The Vorstand writes on September 10:

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

We replied to the Vorstand.

It goes without saying that the Vorstand’s information is false, that it is a sheer invention by the liquidators.

We can say with certainty that this fable was given to the Vorstand by the Letts, Bundists or the Trotzky-Leute who recently held “their own” conference, which they call a Party conference, but which in reality was a conference of liquidators.

So as not to make unsubstantiated statements, so as not to quote our organisational correspondence, we shall confine ourselves to adducing only one printed document openly published in St. Petersburg. (The Vorstand would do well to cease once and for all to take things on faith.)

The St. Petersburg Marxist daily Pravda printed in its issue No. 102, August 28 (September 10, new style), a letter from one of the biggest factories in Kharkov specifically about the elections. The letter states clearly and plainly that the “liquidator candidates” were “not announced” and that they, the liquidators, “deny the need for a workers’ party” (Pravda No. 102, p. 4, col. 1).

From this alone the German comrades can see how shamelessly the Letts, the Bund, Trotsky and sundry private “informants” are deceiving them.

It is clearly a matter of enabling the same Trotsky, the Bund, the Letts or the Caucasians to lay hands on the money on behalf of angeblichen “organisations”, whose existence neither the Vorstand nor anyone else can prove or verify.

Surely the German party with its 90 Social-Democratic newspapers can—if it does not want to put itself in an awkward position by blundering in serious matters—open a discussion on the question of the Social-Democratic Party in Russia and induce all the ... informants to come out into the open with documents bearing their signature. Russia is after all not central Africa, and the German Social-Democratic workers would be able without much difficulty to grasp the truth and at the same time certain members of the Vorstand would be relieved of the necessity of listening to private and unverifiable tales.

Im Auftrage des Zentralkomitees,

Lenin