FROM CORRESPONDENCE WITH A. M. GORKY

4915
NOTES ON A LETTER FROM A. M. GORKY
7—8 March 1920

Dear Vladimir Ilyich!

Please receive Farbman, a very influential contributor to English and American newspapers. He recently returned from America, was in Germany, and is now going there again. He will be in London, where he could render serious assistance to Leonid*, as he is a man of considerable influence in the press. From your conversation with him you will be convinced that he sincerely sympathizes with Soviet power and that he can be excellently utilized. He speaks Russian fluently.

Now: how are things with the scholars?

Will they retain the 1,800 rations?

5 March 1920

All the best!

A. Peshkov

[Retained] for 2 months

I earnestly beg you—retain them—it is absolutely necessary, it is of enormous significance.

I also ask you: call Felix Dzerzhinsky and tell him to release the chemist Sapozhnikov as soon as possible. The latter has found a way to produce from gas tar—which is used to grease tramway rails at curves and switches—homoemulsions, a product of antiseptic significance as powerful as carbolic acid. From a pood of tar one can produce up to 50 buckets of one-percent solution. We have absolute need of this product, because we haul excrement from courtyards onto Nevsky Prospect, and from Nevsky—load it onto tramway platforms and—out of the city.

This is well enough, but—not entirely satisfactory, because now the roads are impassable, the wooden paving blocks are exposed from the snow and absorb all manner of rot. Do you understand? Sapozhnikov's products can be used to spray entire streets. His production process is not complicated.

And another thing: Manukhin must be given the opportunity to work on research into serum against typhus, but here—one can accomplish nothing...

I telegraphed Semashko—he does not reply.

Forgive me for pestering you, but these are matters of extreme importance—you understand this yourself!