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Special pages :
Letter to the Editor of Pravda, November 24, 1912
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1976, Moscow, Volume 35, page 64
Dear Colleague,
I send you the St. Petersburg Mandate which by chance, thanks to an opportunity of very speedy delivery, reached us from Petersburg. Publish this Mandate to the St. Petersburg deputy without fail, in a prominent position and in large type. It is quite intolerable that Luch, distorting the Mandate, is already mentioning it and printing reports about it, while Pravda, whose supporters drew up the Mandate and got it adopted and put it into action, is silent about it.... What does this mean? Can a workersâ newspaper exist if it behaves with such contempt for what interests the workers? (Naturally, if certain expressions and phrases are undesirable from the censorship point of view, partial changes are possible, as usually happens in such cases.) But not to print such a thing means not only to give ground for hundreds of disputes, in which Pravda will be the guilty party, but also to inflict the greatest possible damage on it as a newspaper, on the circulation and organisation of the paper as an undertaking. A newspaper, after all, is not just something for the reader to do a bit of reading in and the writer to do a bit of writing in. A newspaper must itself seek out, itself discover in good time arid, at the appropriate moment, print certain material. A paper must look for and find the contacts it needs. Yet here suddenly is a Mandate to the St. Petersburg deputy, coming from the supporters of Pravda, but not printed in Pravda... Please reply immediately on receiving this letter.