Letter to Friedrich Adolph Sorge, April 9, 1887

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 9 April 1887


First published, slightly abridged, in Briefe und Auszüge aus Briefen von Joh. Phil. Becker, Jos. Dietzgen, Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx u. A. an F. A. Sorge und Andere, Stuttgart, 1906 and in full in: Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, Vol. XXVII, Moscow, 1935
Published in English in full for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 48


ENGELS TO FRIEDRICH ADOLPH SORGE[1]

IN HOBOKEN

London, 9 April 1887

Dear Sorge,

I wrote to you on the 6th[2] and have had your letter of 29 March. Many thanks for your efforts re Jonas.[3] I think they will bear fruit.

So the Executive intends to reply. That will mean a further suppression of facts. But the decision to reply is in itself proof of how base and silly it was to try and worm a verdict out of the sections merely on the strength of the Executive's first allegations. First the sections were supposed to decide. Then, even before the expiry of the time limit they had been set, the Executive goes and implores the Board of Supervisors for a verdict. And now the Executive itself admits that further investigations will be necessary before a decision can be reached.

At all events, the chaps have cut their own throats. And if the Wischnewetzkys who, throughout, have behaved more like Dishragskis,[4] have been forced to describe them as liars, etc., things must have come to a pretty pass. The very fact that Wischnewetzky decided to show you my letter[5] is proof of the quandary these two people are in. As much as a year ago, however, I was 'humane' enough to dismiss the Executive as true German louts.

I'm glad in as much as I can now hope to be relieved of Mrs Wischnewetzky's importunities in the matter of translations. In the first place she translates mechanically, leaving all the real work to me, in the second, having delayed publication[6] in the most deplorable way, she let the thing fall into the hands of the said louts.[7] But we are now no longer in the position of having to hawk around our manuscripts. And now that I've written a preface[8] for her into the bargain, something's evidently amiss just because the said preface is not to the liking of the Executive!

The Avelings have also had sympathetic messages and resolutions from the section in Springfield, Massachusetts; no doubt others will be coming in from the West during the next few days.

The Swiss government would seem—according to conservative English reports—to be preparing to move against the Zurich Sozialdemokrat.[9] I have been expecting this ever since the war-like hubbub first arose; endanger his neutrality and your Swiss turns really nasty. However, it may yet blow over.

On the other hand it looks very much as though the 2 latest assassination attempts in Russia[10] have been the last straw. For a long time no one has had any faith in the government, and now they've lost faith in the Tsar as well. The army is full of discontented, conspiring officers. The Pan-Slavs[11] want to place the half-brother[12] of the present Tsar,[13] the eldest son of Alexander II and la Dolgoruky on the throne. And the police are powerless against the Nihilists.[14] According to the Frankfurter Zeitung, 482 officers were sent from Moscow via Odessa to the convict settlement on Sakhalin in the Pacific. I don't believe that it will last out the year, unless war provides a loophole, and even that might come too late. And once the fun begins in Russia, then hurrah!

Aveling's campaign among the Radical Clubs in London's East End is making good progress.[15] The relatively successful results obtained in the recent elections in Chicago and Cincinnati[16] have been of great assistance to him here—John Bull has no wish to see himself outstripped by those fellows. It's the only foreign influence that is at all effective in this country. At the big Anti-Coercion meeting in Hyde Park the day after tomorrow, Aveling will be speaking from two and Tussy from one of the fifteen platforms.[17] It promises to be one of those big meetings whereby the London working men make manifest a crisis in English politics. Incidentally, the German elections,[18] too, have not failed to make an impact over here.

Are you moving to Rochester, or where?

Your

F. Engels

  1. ↑ This letter was first published in English, abridged, in The Labour Monthly, No. 2, London, 1934 and, in full, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Letters to Americans. 1848-1895. A selection, International Publishers, New York, 1953.
  2. ↑ See previous letter
  3. ↑ At Engels' request Sorge sent a message to Alexander Jonas, Editor of the New Yorker Volkszeitung, on 29 March 1877, asking why he was not publishing Edward Aveling's letter of 16 March 1887 (see note 65).
  4. ↑ An English rendering of 'Waschlapski', the name of a character in Heine's poem Zwei Ritter
  5. ↑ See this volume, pp.15-20
  6. ↑ Of the American edition of The Condition of the Working Class in England
  7. ↑ On behalf of Florence Kelley-Wischnewetzky, the translator of Engels' The Condition of the Working Class in England, Rachel Foster, Secretary of the National Woman Suffrage Association, was trying to find a publisher for the book in America. On 8 February 1886 the Executive of the Socialist Labor Party, which she had approached for support, set up a special committee to deal with publishers, but the negotiations dragged, and the book was published in May 1887, independently of the Executive.
  8. ↑ F. Engels, 'The Labor Movement in America'
  9. ↑ At the insistence of the German authorities the Swiss Federal Council on 18 April 1888 expelled several associate editors of and contributors to the Sozialdemokrat (Eduard Bernstein, Julius Motteler, Hermann Schluter and Leonard Tauscher) from the country. Until 22 September the paper continued to appear in Switzerland, edited by the Swiss Social Democrat Conrad Consett. From 1 October 1888 to 27 September 1890 the paper was published in London.
  10. ↑ This refers to the attempt on the life of Alexander III which took place on 13 March 1887 (see note 72) and to the widespread rumours that preparations for another attempt, to be staged in Gatchina, had been uncovered on 1 April.
  11. ↑ Pan-Slavism was a social and political movement predicated on the notion that the Slavonic peoples ought to oppose themselves to other peoples and merge in a single state with tsarist Russia. In Russia itself, Pan-Slavism assumed a reactionary character in the 1830s. The Russian historian Mikhail Pogodin, drawing on official populism, asserted that the Slavs were superior to other nations and that Russia was destined for hegemony in the Slavonic world. The same ideas, with various modifications, were propounded by the Slavophiles in the 1850s and 1860s (see note 187).
  12. ↑ Georgi Alexandrovish Yurievsky
  13. ↑ Alexander III
  14. ↑ Nihilists were the extreme wing of the radical movement in Russia in the 1860s, intellectuals who believed in the destruction of existing society and culture. The Nihilists rejected the dominant ideology and morality and fought against religious prejudices. They demanded freedom of the individual and equality for women, and favoured the study of the natural and exact sciences. Towards the end of the 1860s the term practically ceased to be used in polemic literature, but in later years reactionary journalists occasionally applied it to revolutionaries. In West European literature the term was used to denote Russian revolutionaries, including the members of the Narodnaya Volya (People's Will), in the 1870s and 1880s.
  15. ↑ After their return from the USA (see note 3) Eleanor Marx-Aveling and Edward Aveling launched a large-scale socialist propaganda campaign in London's Radical Clubs (see note 22). Their purpose was, among other things, to familiarise the British workers with the experience of the US labour movement.
  16. ↑ At the April 1887 municipal elections in the USA, workers' organisations put up candidates in about 60 cities and succeeded in having them elected in twenty. In Cincinnati (Ohio), Milwaukee and Chicago their candidates failed by a few hundred votes.
  17. ↑ In the first half of April 1887 the British House of Commons discussed a Crimes Bill for Ireland which was to introduce a simplified judicial procedure for quelling the growing peasant unrest. The executive authorities were to be allowed to outlaw various societies, and members of the judiciary to pass sentence on charges of plotting, illegal assembly, disobedience to the authorities and the like without a jury. On 11 April 1887 several mass meetings to protest against the Bill were held in Hyde Park, with 100 to 150 thousand people attending. The meetings, held separately by different organisations, were addressed by speakers for the Liberal Party (William Gladstone), the Social Democratic Federation (George Bateman, John Burns, Michael Davitt, John Williams and others), the socialist League (Eleanor Marx-Aveling, Edward Aveling and others) and other organisations. A report headlined 'Irish Crimes Bill, Great Demonstration in Hyde Park, Processions and Speeches', in The Daily Telegraph of 12 April 1887, said that Eleanor Marx-Aveling's speech was warmly greeted and heard with great interest. Despite the protests the two chambers of parliament passed the bill in July 1837. Beginning 23 July, a state of emergency was introduced on the strength of it, initially in four and ultimately in about 30 counties of Ireland.
  18. ↑ On 14 January 1887, Bismarck dissolved the Reichstag in view of its refusal to endorse the proposed seven-year military budget (the bill on the septennate). The elections to the new Reichstag, held on 21 February, were attended by a brutal campaign of terror, directed above all against the Socialist Party. Nevertheless, the Social Democrats polled 763,128 votes (10.1 per cent of the total), 213,038 more than in the 1884 elections. However, owing to the undemocratic additional ballots law the number of Social Democratic deputies declined to 11, as against 24 in the previous Reichstag.