Dear Comrade Editor,

Please insert the following statement in your newspaper. On August 14 the New York quasi-socialist weekly The New Leader printed, without indicating the source, falsified concluding remarks from an alleged speech of mine, also falsified, at a plenum of the C.C., C.P.S.U.(B.). I have neither the possibility nor the desire to read all the inventions of the bourgeois and semi-bourgeois newspapers concerning Soviet public men, and would not have paid attention to this latest falsehood of the press of the capitalists and their underlings. However, a month after printing these falsified remarks The New Leader sent me a telegram in which it requested me to “confirm all July severe criticism of Zinoviev attributed to you in American newspaper reports of proceedings of Central Committee Russian Communist Party.” Not considering it possible to enter into correspondence with an organ which itself fraudulently falsified “remarks” from my speech, and now has the audacity to ask me, with an air of innocence, about the genuineness of these “remarks,” I ask you to allow me to state through your newspaper that the report on the “remarks of Stalin,” published in The New Leader of August 14, 1926, has absolutely nothing in common with my speech at the plenum of the Central Committee, C.P.S.U.(B.), whether in content, form or tone, and that this report is thus a complete and ignorant falsification. With communist greetings,

J. Stalin

21.IX.26

Published in Russian for the first time

A translation was printed in
the Daily Worker (Chicago, U.S.A.),

No. 220, September 30, 1926