J. V. Stalin
Source: Works, Vol. 8, January-November, 1926, pp. 215-216
Publisher: Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1954
First Published: In Russian for the first time September 21, 1926. A translation was printed in the Daily Worker (Chicago, U.S.A.), No. 220, September 30, 1926
Transcription/Markup: Brian Reid
Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (2008). 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.
Dear Comrade Editor,
Please insert the following statement in your newspaper.
On August 14 the New York quasi-socialist weekly The New Leader 2 printed, without indicating the source, falsified concluding remarks from an alleged speech of mine, also falsified, at a plenum of the C.C., C.P.S.U.(B.).
I have neither the possibility nor the desire to read all the inventions of the bourgeois and semi-bourgeois newspapers concerning Soviet public men, and would not have paid attention to this latest falsehood of the press of the capitalists and their underlings.
However, a month after printing these falsified remarks The New Leader sent me a telegram in which it requested me to “confirm all July severe criticism of Zinoviev attributed to you in American newspaper reports of proceedings of Central Committee Russian Communist Party.”
Not considering it possible to enter into correspondence with an organ which itself fraudulently falsified “remarks” from my speech, and now has the audacity to ask me, with an air of innocence, about the genuineness of these “remarks,” I ask you to allow me to state through your newspaper that the report on the “remarks of Stalin,” published in The New Leader of August 14, 1926, has absolutely nothing in common with my speech at the plenum of the Central Committee, C.P.S.U.(B.), whether in content, form or tone, and that this report is thus a complete and ignorant falsification.
With communist greetings,
J. Stalin
21.IX.26
1. The Daily Worker—central organ of the Workers (Communist) Party of America, published in Chicago from January 1922 to January 1927, and since then in New York; at first under the title of The Worker, and from January 1924 the Daily Worker.
2. The New Leader—a weekly newspaper, the organ of the so-called Socialist Party of America, founded in January 1924.