Gavril Miasnikov's Reply to Lenin's Letter (August 1921)

Letter from G. I. Miasnikov to V. I. Lenin. August 6, 1921.

Comrade Lenin.

I received your letter. I don't have time to write you a reply right now. I'm going to the Motovilikha factory and will send you a reply from there, but I can't resist asking the following questions. You write: "It's like the forming of a new party, or your suicide." What does that mean?

You say that I want freedom of the press for the bourgeoisie? But what about freedom of the press for me, a proletarian who has never had anything, a proletarian who has been a member of the party for 15 years, not abroad, but in Russia? For 11 years prior to 1917, due to my political affiliation, I spent 7.5 years in prisons and penal servitude, where I went on hunger strike for a total of 75 days in protest.

I was mercilessly beaten and tortured. The remaining 3.5 years are spent on the run. I have escaped from exile three times, and not like Comrade Trotsky, who had the opportunity to give away reindeer, no, I have escaped like a "hare," [and] not abroad, but for party work in Russia. For me, can freedom of the press, at least within the party, be "granted" to a small extent? Or as soon as I disagreed with you in assessing forces (not panic, but great faith in my own strength), is it “goodbye”? This is a simplified way of solving problems. But what then?—I will think about it and then write you a detailed response to all your arguments. I am bound to the party by blood. I think that the proletariat has never had and never will have a better party.

I consider it my duty as a proletarian within the party to correct all mistakes, both major and minor, from within the party.

I want my article (“Vexed Questions”) to appear in the party press. I want to be allowed to speak at party meetings.

G. Miasnikov.

Text taken from Nadezhda Alikina's book Don Quixote of the Proletarian Revolution: A Documentary Story of how Motovilikha Worker Gavril Miasnikov Fought with the Central Committee of the RCP(B) for Freedom of Speech and Press (1920–1922), p. 167. Translation is computer generated with human assistance.

Letter from G. I. Miasnikov to V. I. Lenin. End of August 1921.

Comrade Lenin.

I couldn't bring myself to reply to your letter. Now I'm back in Moscow—summoned from Motovilikha by the Commission.*

The first time you asked me: 1) What kind of freedom of the press do you want? 2) according to the law, and 3) for the workers, Socialist Revolutionaries, and Mensheviks? From your second letter, it seems that you have found answers to these questions in the "Memorandum" to the Central Committee and the article "Vexed Questions." If this is not the case, then in answering you, I will also answer these questions.

You say that "I have incorrectly applied dialectics," and even more than that, "the question of civil war and civil peace" in the question of how we have won and will continue to win over the peasantry (to the side of the proletariat). On these two most important issues concerning the essence of world politics, I "managed to take a Marxist point of view . . ." and then suddenly "slid into the abyss of sentimentality."

You explain this phenomenon in a rather peculiar way: my guts are not in order, I panicked, I let myself be overwhelmed by a number of sad and bitter facts and lost the ability to soberly assess my strengths, and therefore wanted to go through one door, but ended up going through another—[I] wanted to cure the Communist Party, prescribed its amputation, and ended up in the arms of the bourgeoisie.

Are you serious? You say you'll do anything to convince me, but what does that look like? Words, words, as Hamlet used to say! You yourself understand that this is not serious. It's strong, sure, but not convincing.

I think that with the practical training I have received in life, it is more difficult to fall into the embrace of the bourgeoisie than it is for any of the best and most brilliant thinkers, including you, who have not gone through this practical school of direct, organic proletarian feeling for all the painful issues. Once again, I say, especially about the bourgeoisie—strongly, but not convincingly.

But sin and misfortune happen to everyone. I willingly undertake to examine myself without any false or true pride (and where did you get the idea about false pride? Is that also an argument or an approach?).

I said: “Freedom of speech and the press before 1917 is one thing, freedom of speech in 1917 is another, freedom of speech in 1918-20 is a third, and freedom of speech in 1921 is a fourth aspect of our party's attitude to this question.” (This is not absolute and not pure democracy, I hope.) Freedom of speech before 1917 is our programmatic requirement. In 1917, we achieved it under certain conditions, and in 1918–1920, we considered any talk of freedom of speech and the press to be counterrevolutionary, a move by the bourgeoisie to attack us.

The social process that I tried to comprehend (how well I succeeded is for you to judge) can be broken down into four main stages: 1) the prologue to the social revolution before February 1917, 2) the first day of the social revolution before October 25, 1917, 3) the second day of the social revolution (suppression of resistance and establishment of power). This covers the period from 1918 to 1920 inclusive. And finally, the third day of the social revolution from 1921 onwards.

This dialectical process includes freedom of speech and the press as one of its components, and in each of these moments this issue is resolved differently, just as the situation in which it arises is different.

You say that I have forgotten something trivial—the international bourgeoisie—and you begin a fierce battle with this bourgeoisie, which “buys newspapers, buys writers, buys, buys, and fabricates public opinion in favor of the bourgeoisie." "The bourgeoisie throughout the world is still stronger than us, many times over. To give them another weapon, such as freedom of political organization (freedom of the press, for the press is the center and foundation of political organization), means to make the enemy's task easier."

"We do not wish to end in suicide, and therefore we will not do so. And can anyone deny that the bourgeoisie is defeated, but not destroyed, that it is lying low? This cannot be denied." You say that I am panicking, but what is this?

I have not forgotten either the international bourgeoisie or our own (which we are working hard to create). The fact is that the entire international bourgeoisie, without exception, helped our bourgeoisie to overthrow us, both in word and deed. And the fact that our war lasted three whole years shows how much the international bourgeoisie did to overthrow us, and what? It did not overthrow us! Moreover, it recognizes us as the de facto existing power. What does this show? The balance of power on an international scale.

Stronger? Undoubtedly! But stronger at home, in their own country, while we are stronger because we have the Third International and the proletariat following it, and state power in the hands of the proletariat in Russia.

When you smash the cheekbones of the world bourgeoisie, that's fine, but here's the trouble: you swing at the bourgeoisie, but you hit the workers hardest. Who is being arrested for counterrevolution everywhere now? Workers and peasants, that's for sure. We do not have a communist working class. We simply have a working class, among whom there are monarchists, anarchists, Cadets, and Socialist Revolutionaries (not necessarily party members, but simply people of that mindset). What does this have to do with it? There is no point in reasoning with a bourgeois Cadet, a lawyer, a doctor, or a professor—there is only one remedy here: a beating. It is another matter with the working class. We must not keep them in fear, but influence them ideologically and lead them, and therefore persuasion, not coercion, is the line, the law.

Yes, of course, and to all other dissidents within the working class and peasantry.

This transition is difficult to make; it requires a lot of strength and energy, but we will make it because (I think the same as you) ". . . we and the workers and peasants who sympathize with us have a lot of strength and are in good health," and we will be able to win the sympathy of the workers and peasants to our side, despite the difficulties and hardships, and then even if the devil himself is born, "he will not be scary!"

Freedom of the press, while keeping printing presses and paper in the hands of the proletarian state, cannot be the basis for buying and selling writers and other things.

You declare the slogan of freedom of speech and the press to be neither proletarian nor party slogans, but bourgeois, and you say that you do not believe in absolutism. (Perhaps, under the given conditions?).

I say that it is progressive under all circumstances, and I hope to prove it.

We proletarians did not stand on ceremony with each other when necessary, and those who prevented us from defeating the bourgeoisie were not exactly "persuaded" in a comradely manner; they were imprisoned and sometimes shot. But those were the times: if we had not done so, the bourgeoisie would have defeated us, the entire working class, and would have enslaved all of humanity, spiritually and physically, for a long time to come. Now times are different: we need mass proletarian action; we need to win over the peasantry and conquer it ideologically. If you had proven that the years 1918-20 should not differ in any way from the period beginning in 1921 in terms of tasks, methods of work, and form of organization, then it would be clear that you had proven me wrong. But you did not do that.

Now about the "sad facts."1 You will not deny that publicity will destroy them. You cannot even imagine the extent of bribery and other not-so-good things, which is why you say that I should report all these abuses to the Central Control Commission,2 and you reproach me for not writing to the Central Control Commission. I think that publicity will destroy them much more than the control commissions will. I believe you think so too.

We need a law on freedom of speech and the press in order to keep zealots in check. One of the largest state-owned daily newspapers will have to become a forum for discussion for all shades of public opinion. The Soviet government will support its detractors at its own expense, as the Roman emperors did. This will be freedom of the press under our Russian conditions. If we are in the provinces: in Yekaterinburg, Petrograd, Baku, Kazan, etc., then this will be all that can be done.

The law should punish lies, slander, and calls not to use a particular law, but it should not punish the expression of ideas intended to influence the government, the press, etc.

Our task is to ensure that our freedom of the press is truly and primarily for constitutional elements, not for the bourgeoisie. That is how the law should be made.

You cannot deny that this law will have not only local Russian significance, but also global significance. It will be the most powerful weapon in the hands of communists in all countries in their struggle for ideological control of the working class.

Here in Russia, before passing the law, we will raise a fuss: is this law necessary or not? Will it harm the Soviet government, workers, and peasants? We will organize a nationwide debate on this issue, one that is sensible and thoughtful. What do you think? Will the Soviet government and the Communist Party lose or gain from this? It will lose one thing: the trust of workers and peasants, especially workers, but this loss is worth many gains.

And as for the bourgeoisie buying more power than we do, it will not buy more than it has already purchased, and our law on freedom of the press will neither add to nor detract from this.

You do not believe in the power of the working class, you do not believe in its class logic, but you believe in officials, and that is your misfortune. I do not know if you received my note, where I use myself as an example, but this example illustrates all my arguments. Don't you know that because of conversations like the one I am having, hundreds and thousands of proletarians are sitting in prison, while not a single bourgeois is sitting there who would even dare to ask such questions?

If I am walking free, it is because I have been a communist for 15 years and have cleansed my communist views with suffering. The working masses know all this about me, but what if that were not the case? If I were just a mechanic, a communist at the same factory, where would I be? In the Cheka, or worse, I would have been "escaped" as I once "escaped" Mikhail Romanov, as Luxemburg and Liebknecht were "escaped."3 Once again, you are attacking the bourgeoisie, while we, the workers, have blood on our teeth and our jaws are cracking.

Take a look at the draft resolution of the commission on my expulsion from the party and see what it is. They gave it a servile (I can't describe it any other way) task: "Justify the expulsion of Miasnikov from the party," and it justified it. So much so that I feel ashamed for the Central Committee.

You received the same note in which I ask that my article be published in Pravda for discussion, so that the party can consider this issue, weigh its strengths, and resolve them at the congress—and what happened?

I (perhaps Comrade Zinoviev is right a thousand times over in calling me a poor writer) am not a writer, and perhaps I do not write as clearly as I should or could, but I feel the truth of what I express poorly more strongly than perhaps many others, including Comrade Zinoviev.

Of course, Comrades Bukharin, Zinoviev, Trotsky, and just any hack writer would have said it better, more clearly than I did, and would have made you and everyone in the Central Committee take the issues more seriously, because it's a joke: the memorandum has been lying in the Central Committee for three months, and no one has lifted a finger. No one except Sokolov and Izrailevich (and they did so out of duty) has read it, and what is worse, at the meeting of the Organizing Bureau they said (all of them said!) that they had read it. What was the point of that? But the fault here lies not with anyone else, but with me—I don't know how to do it. I want to be able to do it, but I can't. I attribute this incompetence to the fact that you have classified me as a member of the bourgeoisie, a counterrevolutionary.

You have said very little, or rather nothing at all, about the main cell of state power: the councils of workers' deputies at enterprises, [and] this is the main issue of socialist construction.

If I manage to write something and get it published, I will try to write a brochure for the party congress, but not on one issue, but on all three.

I also think that we will agree on all three issues if we don't panic when they are raised. Regarding the Councils of Deputies: let's try organizing these Councils in a number of factories in the Perm province, such as Motovilikha, Votkinskaya, Chusovaya, Kizel, Lysva, and a few others. I guarantee that productivity will be no less than before, all other conditions being equal (materials, raw materials, food). What if I fail? Well, what then? Shoot me if you have to, and laugh at my idea in practice.

Peasant unions exist in Turkestan. I think you will not condemn me.

With communist greetings, G. Miasnikov.

* This refers to the Commission established on July 29, 1921, by the Organizational Bureau of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) to investigate the activities of G. I. Miasnikov. [—Alikina]

Text taken from Nadezhda Alikina's book Don Quixote of the Proletarian Revolution: A Documentary Story of how Motovilikha Worker Gavril Miasnikov Fought with the Central Committee of the RCP(B) for Freedom of Speech and Press (1920–1922), pp. 168-173. Translation is computer generated with human assistance.

• 1Miasnikov was referring to the abuses, shortcomings, and other challenges of the nascent Soviet state that Lenin had touched on in his letter.—adri
• 2The Central Control Commission oversaw Party discipline.—adri
• 3By "escaped" is likely meant executing someone for some concocted reason, such as attempting to escape. Miasnikov also played a role in the assassination of Mikhail Romanov, who was Russian royalty and the youngest brother of tsar Nicholas II.—adri