Lenin TO M. P. TOMSKY

Dear Comrade,

Just got back to our capital here and read your letter on how things are coming along. As regards the school, you are mistaken if you think “we are in a bad way”. Nothing of the kind. 

That workers, once they are given the money, should agree to go down to the glorious South is natural— there is nothing to complain about in this. Only it is necessary to have resolutions adopted that on the way back these workers are to come here* for a month—this is the crux of the matter. Unless they drop in here all talk about “supervision”, “direction”, etc., is sheer “blague”** or hypocrisy. To come here means to learn something more than Alexinsky’s whining and Lunacharsky’s “socialism”. And believe me, this way***—by bamboozling 20- 50 work- ers with their learning—they will not get very far. Oh no, it’s good enough for making a noise, for bragging about Kautsky’s letter,156 for putting on a show abroad, but there is nothing serious about this underhand indoctrination. Make no mistake, this is not a “school”, but a new Yerogin hostel abroad for surreptitiously filling the heads of dozens of workers with otzovist nonsense. Maximov and Co. will merely make a noise for a while and end up with a fiasco.

The Trotsky business, regrettably, will not work out. We offered him ideal conditions, sincerely wishing to enter into a bloc with him: a salary, payment of the Pravda deficit, equal rights on the Editorial Board, transfer here; he does not agree, but wants a majority on the Editorial Board (two Trotskyites and one Bolshevik!). Clearly we cannot maintain in another city a Trotskyite, not a Party, paper. What Trotsky wants is not to build the Party to- gether with the Bolsheviks, but to create his own faction. Very well, let him try! By means of “his” faction he will win over some people from the Mensheviks, a few from us, and in the long run will inevitably lead the workers to Bolshevism.

As for the “slight revision of the agrarian question”, as you ironically put it, in the given case, if it is a matter of the role of the peasantry in the revolution, it is neces- sary to be more cautious. The beginning should be made with a discussion in the general Party or general Bolshevik press. I especially wish to warn against hasty rejection of Bolshevism and exaggerated faith in the success of the Stolypin agrarian policy. It unquestionably posed new problems which must be studied and studied again; it opened the possibility of a non- revolutionary way out, but this is still as remote from complete success as the stars in the heavens.

Lenin

Written in September, prior to 20 th, 1909 Sent from Paris to Moscow

First published in 1964 

in Collected Works, Fifth  (Russian) Ed., 

Vol. 47 

Printed from a handwritten records copy found in police

* That is, to Paris, where the Bolshevik Centre was located.—Ed.

** Humbug.—Ed.

*** A reference to the factional, splitting activities of the organ- isers of the Capri school.—Ed.