A Letter to American Workingmen, from the Socialist Soviet Republic of Russia
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~4,840 words · 23 passages
Cite this work
- APAVladimir Lenin. (n.d.). A Letter to American Workingmen, from the Socialist Soviet Republic of Russia. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/vladimir-lenin/a-letter-to-american-workingmen-from-the-socialist-soviet-republic-of-russia
- MLAVladimir Lenin. "A Letter to American Workingmen, from the Socialist Soviet Republic of Russia." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/vladimir-lenin/a-letter-to-american-workingmen-from-the-socialist-soviet-republic-of-russia.
- ChicagoVladimir Lenin. A Letter to American Workingmen, from the Socialist Soviet Republic of Russia. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/vladimir-lenin/a-letter-to-american-workingmen-from-the-socialist-soviet-republic-of-russia.
What it is about
An open letter to the workers of the United States (1918), written as the Russian civil war was beginning.
Context and history
Lenin compares the Russian revolution with the American War of Independence and with Lincoln's civil war, reaching for a legitimacy his American readers would recognise. ⚠️ **Catalogue warning:** this letter appears TWICE under different titles — 'A Letter to American Workingmen, from the Socialist Soviet Republic of Russia' and 'A letter to American workingmen (Lenin)'. It looks like the same text with two title pages, but **this is not to be guessed: it must be measured** before either is retired. The original is in RUSSIAN. This is an English translation; for citation, the original.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from scanned images of public domain material from the Google Print project.) A LETTER TO AMERICAN WORKINGMEN _From the Socialist Soviet Republic of Russia_ By N. LENIN Reprinted from THE CLASS STRUGGLE December, 1918 Price--5 Cents NEW YORK THE SOCIALIST PUBLICATION SOCIETY 431 PULASKI ST., BROOKLYN, N. Y. December, 1918 A Letter to American Workingmen By N. Lenin. Moscow, August 20, 1918. Comrades: A Russian Bolshevik who participated in the Revolution of 1905 and for many years afterwards lived in your country has offered to transmit this letter to you. I have grasped this opportunity joyfully for the revolutionary proletariat of America--insofar as it is the enemy of American imperialism--is destined to perform an important task at this time. The history of modern civilized America opens with one of those really revolutionary wars of liberation of which there have been so few compared with the enormous number of wars of conquest that were caused, like the present imperialistic war, by squabbles among kings, landholders and capitalists over the division of ill-gotten lands and profits. It was a war of the American people against the English who despoiled America of its resources and held in colonial subjection, just as their "civilized" descendants are draining the life-blood of hundreds of millions of human beings in India, Egypt and all corners and ends of the world to keep them in subjection. Since that war 150 years have passed. Bourgeois civilization has born its most luxuriant fruit. By developing the productive forces of organized human labor, by utilizing machines and all the wonders of technique America has taken the first place among free and civilized nations. But at the same time America, like a few other nations, has become characteristic for the depth of the abyss that divide