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Special pages :
Letter to Valerian Osinsky, April 12, 1922
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1971, Moscow, Volume 36, pages 578-579.
Copies to
1) The Editorial Board of Pravda
2) Comrade Steklov
3) Rykov and Tsyurupa
April 12, 1922
Comrade Osinsky,
I very much welcome your article in today’s Pravda: “New Data from Local Experience”. It is just such articles that we need most of all, and I think that every People’s Commissariat ought to “provide itself” with a publicist (very closely connected with the work of the People’s Commissariat and the People’s Commissar) to make such reviews.
The worst of our features is an excess of general disquisitions in the press, and political prattle with an extreme lack of study of local experience. Both in the provinces and in the centre, powerful tendencies resist its truthful publicity and truthful evaluation. They are afraid of washing dirty linen in public, afraid of the naked truth, and brush it aside with a meaningful glance, taking a superficial attitude, as Comrade Trotsky correctly said.
We need more and more concreteness in studying local experience, details, the little things, practice, businesslike experience, going deeply into real life—uyezd, volost and village; examination of what, where, by whom and why (by what means) success is achieved, in spite of the abyss of poverty and ruin, in reaching genuine improvement, even if on a small scale, and courage to unmask mistakes and incapacity, popularising and advertising with all our strength every local worker who is in any way outstanding, and making him a model. The more such work is done, the deeper we go into living practice, distracting the attention of both ourselves and our readers from the stinking bureaucratic and stinking intellectual Moscow (and, in general, Soviet bourgeois) atmosphere, the greater will be our success in improving both our press and all our constructive work.
Once again I welcome your initiative, and very much wish that you should continue it further, on a wider scale and more deeply in the same direction.
With communist greetings,
Lenin