Claim: Lenin said “We must be ready to employ trickery, deceit, law-breaking, withholding and concealing truth,”

[TheNZThrower]

Among right-wing circles, Lenin is often quoted as saying the following:

"We must be ready to employ trickery, deceit, law-breaking, withholding and concealing truth, We can and must write in a language which sows among the masses hate, revulsion, scorn, and the like, toward those who disagree with us.

The closes source I was able to find was from an author called Max Eastman, in his book titled ''Reflections on The failure of Socialism'':

"We must be ready to employ trickery, deceit, law-breaking, withholding and concealing truth," he exclaimed. "We can and must write in a language which sows among the masses hate, revulsion, scorn, and the like, toward those who disagree with us."

Eastman was himself a former socialist turned conservatarian who was also a lifelong atheist according to Wikipedia:

Moving to New York City for graduate school, Eastman became involved with radical circles in Greenwich Village. He supported socialism and became a leading patron of the Harlem Renaissance and an activist for a number of liberal and radical causes... As a witness to the Great Purge and the Soviet Union's totalitarianism, he became highly critical first of Stalinism and then of communism and socialism in general. While remaining atheist, he became an advocate of free market economics and anti-communism.

So does anyone else have any leads on this?

 

[Trailspotter]

Lenin helped organize an armed robbery on 26 June 1907 in the city of Tiflis, so law-breaking was definitely on the table for him at the time.

Actually, this action was attributed to Stalin, AFAIR.

 

[FatPhil]

It's not hard to find passages in Lenin promoting truth, and being negative about slander.
E.g. truth being positive:

Everyone knows that the economic struggle of the Russian workers underwent widespread development and consolidation simultaneously with the production of "literature" exposing economic (factory and occupational) conditions. The "leaflets" were devoted mainly to the exposure of the factory system, and very soon a veritable passion for exposures was roused among the workers. As soon as the workers realised that the Social-Democratic study circles desired to, and could, supply them with a new kind of leaflet that told the whole truth about their miserable existence, about their unbearably hard toil, and their lack of rights, they began to send in, actually flood us with, correspondence from the factories and workshops. This "exposure literature" created a tremendous sensation, not only in the particular factory exposed in the given leaflet, but in all the factories to which news of the, revealed facts spread. And since the poverty and want among the workers in the various enterprises and in the various trades are much the same, the "truth about the life of the workers" stirred everyone.

Slander being negative:

It is not surprising that when we call these people Economists, they can do nothing but pour every manner of abuse upon us; call us "mystifiers", "disrupters", "papal nuncios", and "slanderers" go complaining to the whole world that we have mortally offended them; and declare almost on oath that "not a single Social-Democratic organisation is now tinged with Economism". Oh, those evil, slanderous politicians! They must have deliberately invented this Economism, out of sheer hatred of mankind, in order mortally to offend other people.

Both from his highly influential /What Is To Be Done?/ ( https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/iii.htm ) which of course predates (and perhaps helped cause) the bifurcation of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party into the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. The insistence that the system cannot be fixed, and must be destroyed became more polarising over time, and of course there was Bloody Sunday and the failed revolution between this and the robbery @Mendel refers to, so it's perhaps not unexpected that Lenin's patience with soft tactics shortened over time. And regarding robbery specifically, his conclusion from the Paris Commune was that *all* banks should be robbed, that's a core part of a successful Socialist revolution.

 

[deirdre]

a 1985 article claims to have taken these quotes directly from Lenin's writings (i dont speak Russian, so will be trickey to confirm) note: this is a pretend interview

Article:

The questions are mine; the answers are Lenin's, taken from his writings and quoted verbatim.

....
Lenin: Is there such a thing as communist ethics? Is there such a thing as communist morality? . . . In what sense do we deny ethics, morals? In the sense in which they are preached by the bourgeoisie, a sense which deduces the morals from God's commandments. When people talk to us about morality we say: For the communist, morality consists entirely of compact united discipline and conscious mass struggle against the exploiters. We do not believe in eternal morality. We say that our morality is entirely subordinated to the interests of the class struggle. We must be ready to employ trickery, deceit, law- breaking, withholding and concealing truth.

...
Lenin: We can and we must write in the language which sows among the masses hate, revulsion, scorn, and the like, toward those who disagree with us.

Source: https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/os-xpm-1985-04-12-0290120030-story.html

 

[deirdre]

?? a book from 1978

Article:

It was inevitable that Marx was followed by Lenin, whose remarks on the tactics necessary for the Bolshevik Revolution reveal its essence: "We must be prepared to use cunning, deception, breaking laws, retaining and concealing the truth ... We can and must write in a language that sows hatred, disgust, and contempt among the masses for those who disagree with us."[175]

Source: https://www.litmir.me/br/?b=582997&p=103