Letter to Pavel Axelrod, December 7, 1900

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7/XII. 00

Dear P. B.,

Forgive me for not replying to you in my letter to Bainova; ill health interfered. But having consulted with V. I. I can see now that the situation is very serious: we need the foreign news items, the first sheet of the paper is already being printed, and the second is ready except for the news items.[1] The length of the news column should be some 26,000 characters.[2] At a pinch we can throw out something else.

In view of this, please send at once whatever you can. I shall eagerly await your answer.

Address:

Herrn Georg Rittmeyer. Kaiserstraße 53. o. München (enclosure: für Meyer).

With best regards,

Yours,

Petroff

You must excuse my insistence. But what else can I do? I hope that you will see to this as you did with the article on Liebknecht.

  1. The publication in question is Iskra (The Spark), the first all-Russia illegal Marxist newspaper, founded by Lenin in 1900. It played the decisive role in the establishment of a revolutionary Marxist party of the working class in Russia.
    The editors were Lenin, P. B. Axelrod, Vera Zasulich, Y. 0. Martov, G. V. Plekhanov and A. N. Potresov. At first the Secretary of the Editorial Board was Inna Smidovich-Lehmann, and from the spring of 1901, Nadezhda Krupskaya, who also attended to all of Iskra’s correspondence with Russian Social-Democratic organisations.
    After the Second Congress of the Party, beginning with issue No. 52, the newspaper became the mouthpiece of the Mensheviks.
  2. Rakovsky’s article of some 10,000 characters included. —Lenin