Letter to Moisei Kharitonov, Beginning of August, 1916

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Dear Comrade,

Nadya is giving you a secret meeting place, password and ways of communicating with us for Marcu.[1]

Let him ask a French- or German-speaking person to come to Petrograd (through the secret address) and tell him in greatest possible detail all the foreign news about the movement of the Lefts, about Vorbote No. 1 and No. 2, about our disputes on disarmament (I am sending my article[2] ; show it to him—incidentally, write me where Nobs is), about the German Arbeiterpolitik,[3] about the arrests in Germany, about Longuet and the Longuetists in France, about the arrest of Maclean in England, and generally all about the movement of the Lefts and internationalists in Europe and America in greater detail?

Then let him offer his services (there, in Petrograd) to call on the way at Moscow, Kiev, Odessa (where he is travelling) for the same purpose and for passing on the address for letters to us.

Teach him (thoroughly) to write with invisible ink and to maintain the strictest secrecy in Russia: he must act the part of a soldier who is going to Rumania to fight, and stick to that!

We don’t know yet when we shall be back. Probably not before a fortnight.

Greetings,

Yours,

Lenin

  1. ↑ This refers to Valeriu Marcu, a Rumanian Social-Democrat who lived in Switzerland during the war. In 1916 he went to Paris, Moscow and Rumania on Lenin’s errand.
  2. ↑ Nobs will correct the language himself. —Lenin
  3. ↑ Arbeiterpolitik—a weekly devoted to questions of scientific socialism, organ of the Bremen group of Left Radicals headed by Johann Knief and Paul Fröhlich. The group joined the Communist Party of Germany in 1919. The journal was published in Bremen from 1916 to 1919.
    After the October Revolution the journal devoted considerable space to information about life in Soviet Russia.
    The reference below is to Shlyapnikov’s article “Workers’ Russia During Twenty Months of War” published later in Sbornik No. 1.