Lenin TO L. B. KAMENEV -2

Dear K.,

I received your letter (at last! I was about to kick up a row). It is too late to send an express message or a wire.

We are in too “great haste”, you write. I don’t know....* How could Dan and Co. have been allowed to get away with it? And what else . . . wait for. But it is a great pity you were not in “greater haste” to write us at once about the “formal doubts” entertained by the Pravda liquidators. The proofs were sent to you ten days ago: if you had made haste to reply at once that you are not clear on this or that point, you would have had complete copies of the letters from Russia already a week ago. Now the C.O., which came out late last night, gives more quotations from the letters.

Is your withdrawal from Pravda essential for us? You seem almost ready to say yes—again being “in haste” to write after the very first conflict with Trotsky.

I personally do not think that your withdrawal from Pravda is essential [to us], so long as Pravda [is] run so colourlessly. After reading ... [your] item in No. 11, I thought ([and] Grigory also said): this is toothless, colour- less, [inconsequential], verbose....

What is the purpose of our policy now, at this precise moment? To build the Party core not on the cheap phrases of Trotsky and Co. but on genuine ideological rapprochement between the Plekhanovites and the Bolsheviks. Whether this will work out I do not know. If it doesn’t, then back to the Bolshevik Centre. If it does, it will be a substantial step forward.

We shall write to the Russian C.C. (insisting that Makar call it together without waiting for the Menshevik scoun- drels) that Dan (and Martov) should be expelled from the C.O. and Igor from the C.C. Bureau Abroad and re- placed with Plekhanovites. The Plekhanovites printed ... [in an issue] of Golos Sotsial-Demokrata (you [ought to receive it] within a few days).

...  for the Golos people ... against ... 10 .... For the Plekhanovites 11 .. but it isn’t so much a matter of numbers as of the beginning of a break. The first step is always the hardest.

In a few days the Mensheviks will publish Martynov’s reply to Plekhanov and, evidently, a reply to the C.O. Although Plekhanov does wish to keep open the possibility of “returning” to the Golos people, nothing so far seems to be coming of it.

Your withdrawal from Pravda—if it is inevitable—should in my view be arranged with the utmost care (write an article against the liquidators and against Golos, let Trotsky turn it down!) with a view to reporting to the C.O. and drafting a decision on the publication of a popular newspaper by the Central Organ. Either that, or back to....

The Vienna group will say nothing.

About the report, I am not satisfied. To remind a per- son does not mean to harass him. Send the beginning. The whole thing by May 1 will be too late.

With best regards,

Yours

Lenin

Sent from Paris to Vienna

First published in 1964 

rks, Fifth

an) Ed., Vol. 47 

Printed from the original i