Stalin to members of the Politburo, Adoratsky, Knorin, Stetsky, Zinoviev, Pospelov August 5, 1934
Archive: RGASPI. F. 17. Op. 3. D. 950. L. 87–89. Script. Typescript.
Members of the Politburo
Comrades. Adoratsky, Knorin, Stetsky, Zinoviev, Pospelov.
In issue 13-14 of Bolshevik there is a note "From the Editor" (pages 86-90), which comments on F. Engels' letter to Ioan Nadezhda of January 1888 and where Engels' views on the coming war are clearly falsified.
Incorrectly and jugglery using Engels' letter to the Romanian Ioan Nadezhda (1888), the editors of Bolshevik assert in their note that:
a) Engels "stands wholly in a defeatist position", in a position of defeat "and his bourgeois fatherland";
b) “Lenin defended a similar position in the war of 1914”;
c) Lenin, therefore, did not give anything essentially new in the matter of determining the nature of the war and the policy of the Marxists in connection with the war.
In this way:
1. The editors of Bolshevik hid from readers that Engels did not understand the imperialist nature of the coming war, which is clear both from Engels' letter to Ioan Nadezhda (1888) and from his article "The Foreign Policy of Russian Tsarism" (1890), as well as from his famous letters to Bebel (1891). It suffices to compare with these works of Engels the tables of Lenin published in the same issue of Bolshevik "The experience of summarizing the main data of world history after 1870", where Lenin notes the imperialist struggle of the powers (including Germany) for colonies and spheres of influence , even at the beginning 80s of the last century, as the cause of the war, in order to understand the whole difference in the views of Lenin and Engels on the nature of the war.
2. The editors of Bolshevik hid from readers that Engels, 2-3 years after the letter to Ioan Nadezhda, when the Franco-Russian alliance began to take shape as opposed to the alliance of Germany, Austria and Italy, changed his attitude towards the war and began to speak out already not for the defeat, but for the victory of Germany (see especially Engels's letters to Bebel of 1891), and, as is well known, Engels retained such an attitude until the end of his life.
3. The editors of Bolshevik concealed from the readers that between Engels's passive defeatism ("to wish them all to be defeated"), which he later abandoned in favor of defencism , as was said, and Lenin's active defeatism ("the transformation of the imperialist war into civil war") - there is no way to draw an equal sign.
4. The editors of Bolshevik concealed from the readers the undoubted fact that Lenin, and only Lenin, gave a fundamentally new and only correct line both on the question of the nature of the war and on the question of the policy of the Marxists in connection with the war.
Such is the case with the tricks of the editorial staff of Bolshevik.
That Engels was and remains our teacher, only idiots can doubt it. But it does not at all follow from this that we must gloss over Engels' mistakes, that we must hide them and, even more so, pass them off as indisputable truths. Such a policy would be a policy of lies and deceit. Nothing is so contrary to the spirit of Marxism and the precepts of Marx-Engels as such a policy unworthy of Marxists. Marx and Engels themselves said that Marxism is not a dogma, but a guide to action. This explains why Marx and Engels themselves repeatedly changed and supplemented certain provisions of their works. This means that Marx and Engels considered that the main thing in their teaching was not the letter, not individual propositions, but the spirit of this teaching, its method. It cannot be otherwise, since with a different installation , further developmentMarxism would have been unthinkable, for Marxism would have turned into mumuya. It cannot be otherwise, because otherwise Lenin would not have been the man who not only restored Marxism, but also developed it further. And if Lenin developed Marxism further, is it not clear that we should not be afraid to record in Lenin's asset what is new about the war that belongs to him by right and what is given to them as new, in the interests of the further development of Marxism?
There can be no doubt that only disrespect for Marxism and its founders could have dictated to the editors of Bolshevik a policy of glossing over and concealing facts, a policy of belittling Lenin's role in working out a new line of Marxism in questions of the nature of the war and the policy of the Marxists in connection with the war.
I think that in their note the editors of Bolshevik tacitly proceed from one Trotskyist-Menshevik line, by virtue of which Engels supposedly said everything that needed to be said about the war, its nature and the policy of the Marxists in connection with the war, which the Marxists All that remains is to restore what Engels said and apply it to practice, that Lenin allegedly did just that, taking “a similar position in the war of 1914”, that whoever does not agree with this is revising Marxism, he is not a real Marxist.
As is well known, the Trotskyist-Menshevik gentlemen proceeded from the same attitude when they denied the possibility of the victory of socialism in one country, referring to the fact that Engels in his Principles of Communism (1846) denied such a possibility, that Engels had already said everything what needed to be said, and whoever continues to insist on the possibility of the victory of socialism in one country is revising Marxism.
It is hardly necessary to prove that such an attitude is thoroughly rotten and anti-Marxist, for it dooms Marxism and its method to stagnation, to vegetation, sacrificing it to the letter.
I think that this wrong attitude lies at the root of the mistake made by the editors of Bolshevik.
It seems to me that the Bolshevik magazine is falling (or has already fallen) into unreliable hands. The very fact that the editors tried to publish Engels's article "On the Foreign Policy of Russian Tsarism" in Bolshevik as a guiding article does not speak in favor of the editors. The Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, as is known, timely intervened in the matter and stopped such an attempt. But this circumstance, obviously, did not go to the editors for the future. On the contrary, the editors, as if in defiance of the instructions of the Central Committee, placed after the warning of the Central Committee such a note that cannot be qualified otherwise than as an attempt to mislead readers about the real position of the Central Committee. But Bolshevik is an organ of the Central Committee.
I think it's time to put an end to this situation.
I. Stalin.
5.VIII.34
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