Letter to Pavel Axelrod, March 22, 1902

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Author(s) Lenin
Written 22 March 1902


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First published in 1924 in Lenin Miscellany II. Sent from Munich to Zurich. Printed from the original.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1971, Moscow, Volume 36, page 107
Keywords : Letter, Pavel Axelrod

March 22, 1902

Dear P. B.,

How is your health after your journey? Have you recovered from the life of a wanderer, and from the “reaction” you expected when you were going away?

Velika Dmitrievna sent you G. V.’s programme and our scheme for a “settlement in committee”,[1] through a committee of arbitration sui generis. This scheme seems to be falling through because of G. V.’s unwillingness, but I don’t yet know this for certain. I should like to know your impression of G. V.’s new draft and which of the two drafts you now favour.

The copying of your pamphlet[2] has only just been started: up to now the copyist was busy with copying for Iskra (with Tsvetov away, Iskra has been making very slow headway: only one issue will appear in March). Evidently delay is inevitable if your pamphlet is to be published here; but if you are very much opposed to this, let me know, and we may then send it on to Geneva. If speed is not so important for you, then as soon as the copying is finished and Tsvetov returns, the pamphlet will be sent to the printers.

A few more words about the programme. We consider it very undesirable to put it up for a vote by the whole League (instead of the editorial board alone), respective[3] have a discussion in the press among ourselves (although this will not be easy to avoid if the attempt to reach agreement fails). What is your opinion?

All the very best wishes for your health.

Yours....

  1. ↑ A reference to the second draft Party Programme drawn up by Plekhanov.
    The “settlement in committee ” consisted in agreeing two draft programmes—Lenin’s and Plekhanov’s—in a co-ordinating committee appointed by the Iskra Editorial Board to work out a single draft programme of the RSDLP Prospective members for the committee were Martov, Zasulich, Dan or Deutsch (see Lenin Miscellany II, pp. 91–92).
    The draft agreement did not “fall through”, as Lenin had feared: Plekhanov agreed to a settlement in committee, and the agreed draft was approved by the Iskra Editorial Board in Zurich on April 14, 1902, in Lenin’s absence. The draft Programme of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, worked out by the Editorial Board of Iskra and Zarya, was published in Iskra No. 21 on June 1, 1902.
  2. ↑ A reference to P. B. Axelrod’s article which he intended to issue in pamphlet form as a supplement to Iskra. The article, entitled “The Emergence in Our Country of Bourgeois Democracy as an Independent Revolutionary Force”, appeared only in 1906 in a collection of his articles, The Struggle of Socialist and Bourgeois Trends in the Russian Revolutionary Movement.
  3. ↑ Or.—Ed.
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