Published:
First published in 1929.
Sent from Geneva to Russia.
Printed from the original.
Source:
Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
1974,
Moscow,
Volume 34,
pages 218-219.
Translated: Clemens Dutt
Transcription\Markup:
D. Moros
Public Domain:
Lenin Internet Archive
(2005).
You may freely copy, distribute,
display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and
commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet
Archive” as your source.
• README
P.S.[1] January 2, 1904. I have just received the proofs of Axelrod’s article in Iskra No. 55[2] (No. 55 will be out in a couple of days). It is much more disgusting even than Martov’s article (“Our Congress”) in No. 53. We have here “ambitious fantasies” “inspired by the legends about Schweitzer’s dictatorship”; we have here again accusations about “the all-controlling centre” “disposing at its personal (sic!) discretion” of “Party members who are converted (!) into cogs and wheels”. “The establishment of a vast multitude of government departments, divisions, offices and workshops of all kinds.” The conversion of revolutionaries (really and truly, sic!) “into head clerks, scribes, sergeants, non-commissioned officers, privates, warders, foremen” (sic!). The C.C., it says (according to the Majority’s idea), “must be merely the collective agent of this authority (the authority of the Iskra editorial board), and be under its strict tutelage and vigilant control”. Such, it says, is “the organisational utopia of a theocratic nature” (sic!). “The triumph of bureaucratic centralism in the Party organisation—that is the result”... (really and truly, sic!). In connection with this article I again and again ask all C.C. members: is it really possible to leave this without a protest or fight? Don’t you feel that by tolerating this silently you are turning yourselves into nothing more nor less than gossip-mongers (gossip about Schweitzer and his pawns) and spreaders of slander (about bureaucrats, i.e., yourselves and the Majority as a whole)? And do you consider it possible to conduct “positive work” under such “ideological leadership”? Or do you know of any other means of honest struggle apart from a congress?
((The Martovites, apparently, have Kiev, Kharkov, Gornozavodsky, Rostov and the Crimea. This makes ten votes+the League+the editorial board of the C.O.+two in the Council=16 votes out of 49. If all efforts are at once directed towards Nikolayev, Siberia and the Caucasus, it is fully possible to leave them with one-third.))
[1] This letter is a postscript to the previous letter of December 30, 1903, both being dispatched on January 5, 1904.
[2] This refers to Axelrod’s article “The Unity of Russian Social-Democracy and Its Tasks”, published in Iskra Nos. 55 and 57. Lenin here refers to the first part of this article published in issue No. 55 under the sub-heading “Liquidation of Primitivism Summed Up”.
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