How Lenin's Letter to American Workers was smuggled into the USA

Soviet Lenin illustration.

Written by Soviet historian Pytor Petrov in Soviet Life in 1969, this is a look at how Lenin's "Letter to American Workers" was smuggled into the United States in the winter of 1918-1919 as the young Soviet Republic fought for its life.

(Learn more about the letter at: Lenin's Letter to American Workers written August 20, 1918)

Text:

A SHIP from Copenhagen docked at one of the piers in New York. Among the passengers who hurried down the gang plank was a carpenter who had been hired in the Danish capital. He was a quiet, neatly dressed, unobtrusive man. From a couple of curt sentences he had spoken his work mates gathered that, judging from the accent, he had been born somewhere in Eastern Europe. No one guessed that he was a messenger from Soviet Russia.

No one suspected that the vessel's carpenter was delivering the text of the "Letter to the American Workers" which had been written on August 20, 1918, by Vladimir Lenin, head of the Soviet Government.

What had prompted the Soviet Premier, besieged as he was with thousands of internal problems, to address a letter to people in another country, bypassing official channels?

The October Revolution had started world wide repercussions. It had even displaced news from the fronts of the First World War in newspaper columns. The stories describing the events in Petrograd and Moscow were far less objective than the war communiques. They reflected sheer lack of understanding, deliberate distortions and wanton fabrications.

The attitude of the Western governments to the first country in the world to be governed by factory workers and peasants was more than hostile. The Western nations had organized for armed intervention.

While a similar stand was taken by the United States, the policy was not approved unanimously. American workers and Socialists were holding meetings, staging demonstrations and collecting petitions in defense of the Russian Revolution. Undoubtedly, this meant moral support for the Soviets.

Americans had also sought to help materially by forming detachments of American Red Guards; their purpose was to defend the Bolsheviks from the German troops that had attacked the Soviet Republic in February 1918. The detachments were not allowed to cross the ocean, but the demands voiced by American workers to support the Russian Revolution, recall the troops from Soviet Russia, recognize the new government and render it assistance did not stop.

Lenin realized how difficult it was for Americans to understand what had been happening in a distant country on the other side of the world. He read Western news papers and was aware of the tremendous flood of rumors and lies being circulated abroad about the Russian Revolution. It was not difficult for him to figure out what a picture the Bolsheviks presented in such biased accounts. Brutal fanatics and destructionists - nothing more.

On the other hand, Lenin knew from his talks with some foreigners that there were quite a few people in the West who refused to believe those rumors and were hungry for truthful information on the developments in Russia. For example, he had learned something of the reactions in the United States from Robert Minor, an American journalist and cartoonist who had visited Moscow. The Soviet Premier had a high regard for the revolutionary and democratic traditions of the American people. He decided he would try to tell them the truth about the Russian Revolution and the first steps taken toward establishing a socialist society.

Once written, Lenin's Letter posed a problem: How to get it to the American people? The Soviet Government had recently made several unreciprocated attempts to establish peaceful relations with the United States. Finally in October 1918 Georgi Chicherin, Soviet Russia's People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs, sent a note to President Woodrow Wilson requesting an end to the intervention and a beginning of peaceful negotiations. The Note, forwarded through diplomatic channels via the Norwegian Attaché in Moscow, remained unanswered and was kept from the public as well.

It was obviously impossible under such conditions to send the "Letter to the American Workers" through ordinary channels. The war was going on in Russia and Europe. Moscow was almost cut off from the outside world. In order to help the Letter reach its destination, it was necessary to find some other way of delivering it. It was therefore brought to New York in the fall of 1918 by Russian Bolshevik Pyotr Travin, who crossed the ocean as a carpenter on board the Danish vessel Copenhagen. He had returned shortly before from the United States, where he had lived in emigration. He listened to the appeal for help made by Mikhail Borodin, a party functionary, who had also lived in America for some time and had often told Lenin of his emigration experiences. In Stockholm Waclaw Vorovsky, Ambassador Plenipotentiary of the Soviet Republic in Scandinavia, and Borodin gave Travin three copies of the Letter, plus the Decrees on Peace and Land and texts of resolutions on public education, a copy of the Constitution of Soviet Russia, and other documents and printed matter.

In New York Travin found the address of a typesetter, Ivan Novikov, who worked for Novy Mir (New World) , a Russian-language workers' paper. Novikov helped him get the Letter and other materials to the famous journalist and leftwing Socialist John Reed, who visited Russia in 1917 and later wrote Ten Days That Shook the World, a book about the Russian Revolution. John Reed contributed to Novy Mir and was often seen at the editorial office. He consulted other leftwing Socialists on what could be done to get the documents published in leading papers.

Several copies of the Moscow newspapers Pravda and Izvestia had reached the United States by that time. They featured Chicherin's Note to President Wilson (mentioned above). John Reed decided to do everything to help acquaint as many Americans as possible with the Soviet Government note and Lenin's letter.

Travin and John Reed went to Washington to arrange an interview with Hiram Johnson, Republican Senator from California. John Reed informed the Senator that the Administration had concealed the peaceful proposals made by the Soviet Republic even from Congress, and Johnson discussed it in a speech he made to the Senate.

After that the news spread like wildfire through the country and was given broad coverage in the press. The Letter and the Note were published in The New York Times and other leading papers, as well as in socialist and labor publications such as The Revolutionary Age, The Class Struggle, The Liberator, New York Call and Novy Mir. Lenin's Letter was also published separately as a pamphlet. All told, about five million copies of the letter were circulated in the US.

The Letter was considered by Congress. On February 4, 1919, Republican Senator Frank Kellogg referred to a reprint of the message from Russia which had appeared in the January 23 St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He proposed filing with Congress, as official documents, the Constitution of Soviet Russia and the Decree on Land.

What was the essence of Lenin's Letter? Why was it circulated so broadly overseas?

The head of the Soviet Government was explaining the significance of the victory scored by the October Revolution and its role in the progress of mankind. He was defending the proletarian government from its attackers. Firstly, he refuted the Entente* powers' unfair accusation that in concluding the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the Soviets had struck a deal with the Germans and betrayed the interests of Russia's allies in the First World War. Lenin justified the measure. The Soviet Government had proposed that all belligerent countries should conclude peace without annexations or indemnities. All had ignored Russia's appeal. Exhausted by war and just emerged from czarist rule, the country found itself in a precarious position. The newly established government was threatened with overthrow in its turn. In order to save the Socialist Revolution, it was necessary to sacrifice a portion of Russia's territory. “ There are agreements and agreements," Lenin wrote, recalling that when the Americans waged their war of liberation, they had taken advantage of the strife among three European nations, all of whom threatened the freedom of the American people. In its war against the British, America enlisted the help of France and Spain. Then why should anybody blame Soviet Russia, Lenin asked, for concluding an agreement in order to preserve its independence?

Lenin denied the accusations that the Bolsheviks had caused chaos and destruction in Russia. "The class struggle,” he wrote, "has always, inevitably, and in every country, assumed the form of civil war, and civil war is inconceivable without the severest destruction." " If we only take into consideration ,” he asserted, "the destruction of some branches of industry and of the national economy, America in 1870 was behind 1860. But what a pedant, what an idiot would he be who, on these grounds, were to deny the immense ...revolutionary significance of the American Civil War of 1863-65 !"

He also replied to opponents' charges of "needless terror.” Revolution, he said, is unthinkable without the resistance of the exploiters; it cannot be victorious, therefore, unless the resistance is crushed. Lenin cited the bourgeois revolutionists in Britain and France, who resorted to terror against the royalists, hanging or guillotining noblemen and aristocrats. The victorious bourgeoisie, he pointed out, looked back on their methods as just and legitimate. Equally just and legitimate, Lenin insisted, was the force employed by the working class against its many enemies.

These enemies, incidentally, were far from fastidious and resorted to the most brutal methods in their turn. One of their victims was Lenin himself - ten days after he completed "Letter to the American Workers,” he was dangerously wounded by several shots fired by a Socialist-Revolutionary terrorist, Fanny Kaplan. Thus he found the talk of " Bolshevik violence" increasingly hypocritical, coming from a world bourgeoisie which had slaughtered ten million men and maimed twenty million in its “war... to decide (which] vultures are to rule the world.”

In the Letter Lenin wrote with respect about America, a country that had taken first place in the world in the development of productive forces and the introduction of machinery and modern techniques. He spoke with sympathy of the American people, who "have a revolutionary tradition. ... That tradition is the war of liberation...."

The circulation of the letter from Russia brought immediate response from American workers, in the form of large demonstrations against the intervention and in defense of the Soviet Republic. Petitions were sent to Congress, and shippers of arms to the countries fighting against Russia were faced with refusals to load their cargoes. Progressive publications launched a campaign for the withdrawal of American troops, under the slogan “Hands Off Soviet Russia!" With the end of World War I, attempts had increased to crush the Soviet Republic by armed force and, correspondingly, opposition to the intervention was growing. The message brought by a ship's carpenter was one of the largest single factors in stirring support in America for the new socialist regime.

*The Triple Entente was a bloc formed by France, Britain and Russia before the First World War to oppose the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy in the struggle for a redivision of the world.