Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

Letter To J. V. Stalin


Written: 15 April, 1922
First Published: Published for the lint time, according to the manuscript
Source: Lenin’s Collected Works, 2nd English Edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1965, Volume 33, page 344
Translated: David Skvirsky and George Hanna
Transcription\HTML Markup: David Walters & R. Cymbala
Copyleft: V. I. Lenin Internet Archive (www.marx.org) 2002. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License


To Comrade Stalin (for the Political Bureau)

April 15

I have just received the book Materialy p0 istorii frankorusskikh otnosheni za 1910-1914 gody.[1]

This massive tome of 733 pages has been published with that disgraceful, truly Soviet slovenliness which ought to be punished by imprisonment. The price is not indicated. The responsible person or persons are not named. There is no index!! The simple list of names has been compiled carelessly. And so on.

I suggest that:

(1) Hanecki and Karakhan he given two days in which to find all the persons responsible for this publication,

(2) hold up the sale of the book,

(3) write a notice to be inserted in the book to indicate what is missing,

(4) and draw up an intelligible index; in short, that by Thursday they should submit a brief report to the Central Committee on all these monstrosities—the defects in the publication, and on the ways of correcting them.

Lenin

P.S. M. N. Pokrovsky is named in the “Preface”—which is unsigned!! He has worked on compiling the material but it is obvious that he is not responsible for the publication, for the way the book has been put out.


Endnotes

[1] This book (Documents on the History of Franco-Russian Relations for 1910-14) was published by the Peop1e’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs in 1922; Changes were made in it on the basis of suggestions from Lenin.