Telephone Message to Grigori Zinoviev, August 22, 1921

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Comrade Zinoviev

1. Is it possible to find and send me my preface to the German edition of my book on imperialism? I sent the preface to Petrograd a year ago. It seems to have been lost somewhere.

2. I am very anxious about whether our slogan of collecting donations in aid of Russia only directly to our address, i.e., not through the governments, has been brought out quite clearly and prominently in the foreign workers’ press in general, and in the communist press in particular.

We signed an agreement with the American Secretary of Commerce, Hoover, in Riga on Saturday (do not publish anything about this yet; and Harding has been calling on the American people to send in all donations through Hoover.

It would be extremely important for the Comintern to put forward a definite slogan, without coming out against the American Government for the time being, saying that the workers should send in their donations only directly to the address of Soviet Russia’s representatives abroad.

For any donations sent through the bourgeois governments necessarily carry for us, directly or indirectly, to a greater or lesser extent, some sort of strings, whereas the workers will undoubtedly agree to send their donations to us without any strings, and this is a distinction of tremendous importance for us.

Is it possible to check whether the Comintern and the trade union press sympathising with us have accepted the need to send in donations to the Soviet Government’s address without any strings, and to start a broad campaign to have all workers set aside a day’s earnings in aid of the famine-stricken in Russia?

Lenin