Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

555

To: INESSA ARMAND^[1]

Written: Written March 18, 1911
Published: First published in 1964 in Collected Works, Fifth (Russian) Ed., Vol. 49. Sent from Ambulant (Switzerland) to Clarens. Printed from the original.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, [1977], Moscow, Volume 43, page 616^b.
Translated: Martin Parker and Bernard Isaacs
Transcription\Markup: R. Cymbala
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.

Dear Friend,

I am writing to you on my way back from a lecture. Yesterday (Saturday) I lectured on the amnesty.^[2] We are all dreaming of leaving. If you are going home drop in to see us first. We’ll have a talk. I would very much like you to find out for me in England discreetly whether I would be granted passage.

All the best,
Yours,
V. U.

Notes

[1] This letter (postcard) to Inessa Armand in Clarens was written by Lenin on his way to Zurich from La Chaux-de-Fonds and posted by him in Ambulant (Switzerland). In La Chaux-de-Fonds—a large working-class centre of Switzerland—Lenin delivered a lecture (in German) at a workers’ club on the Paris Commune and the prospects of development of the Russian revolution (“Will the Russian Revolution Follow the Path of the Paris Commune?”).

[2] Lenin is referring to the declaration of the Provisional Government setting fort its political programme, one point of which provided for a complete and immediate amnesty in political and religious cases (see Vestnik Vremennogo Pravitelstva No. 1, March 5, 1917).