Letter to Vladimir Adoratsky, September 20, 1921

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Comrade Adoratsky:

Could you help me find the following two things:

1) the article (or extract from the pamphlet? or letter?) by Engels where he says, on the strength of the experience of 1648 and 1789, that there is apparently a law demanding that the revolution should advance beyond the point where it can cope, to consolidate the less significant transformations?

I recall that this was published in our Bolshevik newspaper (Proletary?) abroad during the 1908–1912 epoch, but my recollection is hazy[1];

2) Engels’s letter to Weydemeyer of 12.IV.1853. I shall be very grateful for any hints.

Yours,

Lenin

  1. ↑ A reference to the following passage in F. Engels’s article “On Historical Materialism” (English introduction to Socialism: Utopian and Scientific): “In order to secure even those conquests of the bourgeoisie that were ripe for gathering at the time, the revolution had to be carried farther—exactly as in 1793 in France and in 1848 in Germany. This seemed, in fact, to be one of the laws of evolution of bourgeois society.” Quoted from Lenin’s article “The Assessment of the Russian Revolution” published on May 10 (23), 1908 in Proletary (see present edition, Vol. 15, p. 58, and also Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Vol. II, Moscow 1962, p. 105). For F. Engels’s letter to Weydemeyer see Marx and Engels. Selected Correspondence, Moscow, 1965, pp. 74–78.