Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

813

To: COMRADE STALIN

Published: Printed from secretarial notes (typewritten copy).

Source: Lenin's Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1976, Moscow, Volume 45, pages 607b-608a.

Translated: Yuri Sdobnikov

Transcription\Markup: C. Farrell

Public Domain: Lenin Internet Archive (2000). 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.

Top secret

Personal

Copy to Comrades Kamenev and Zinoviev

Dear Comrade Stalin:

You have been so rude as to summon my wife to the telephone and use bad language. Although she had told you that she was prepared to forget this, the fact nevertheless became known through her to Zinoviev and Kamenev. I have no intention of forgetting so easily what has been done against me, and it goes without saying that what has been done against my wife I consider having been done against me as well. I ask you, therefore, to think it over whether you are prepared to withdraw what you have said and to make your apologies, or whether you prefer that relations between us should be broken off.[1]

Respectfully yours,

Lenin

Notes

[1] A reference to the following fact. After Lenin, with the permission of his doctors, had, on December 21, 1922, dictated a letter to Trotsky on the foreign trade monopoly (see this volume, Document 811), J. V. Stalin, whom a C.C. Plenum decision of December 18 had made personally responsible for the observance of the medical regimen ordered for Lenin, used offensive language against Nadezhda Krupskaya and threatened to take the case to the Control Commission for having taken down the said letter. On December 23, 1922, Krupskaya sent Kamenev a letter asking for protection from “the gross interference in my personal life, offensive language and threats”.

Nadezhda Krupskaya apparently told Lenin of this fact in early March 1923. Having learned about this Lenin dictated the document here published.

Maria Ulyanova later wrote in a letter to the presidium of the July (1926) Joint Plenum of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission of the R.C.P.(B.), at which the question had been raised by G. Y. Zinoviev, one of the leaders of the “new opposition”, that Stalin had offered his apologies.