V. I.

Lenin

292

TELEGRAM TO THE KNYAGININ UYEZD LAND DEPARTMENT

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Uyezd Land Department
Knyaginin
Copy to Knyaginin Second Zapyansk Society
Ichalki

Compulsory measures of any kind to make the peasants pass over to the communal working of the fields are
impermissible. Non-observance of this will be punished with
all the severity of revolutionary law. [2]

Lenin
Chairman, Council of People’s
Commissars [1]

__SU

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Notes:
[1]
The telegram was signed also by S. P. Sereda, People’s
Commissar for Agriculture.— Ed.

[2]
This telegram was sent in connection with a report from
Knyaginin Uyezd, Nizhni-Novgorod Gubernia, addressed to Lenin at
the Council of People’s Commissars, stating that the local
authorities were forcibly making the peasants join artels and communes.

The telegram was drafted in the People’s Commissariat for
Agriculture.

On April 10, 1919, the following circular letter, signed by
Lenin and Sereda, was published in Izvestia :

“ To all Gubernia Land Departments.

“ Copies to Executive Committees.

“ Information has reached the People’s Commissariat for
Agriculture that for the purpose of organising state farms, communes
and other collective associations, the land departments and state
farm boards, contrary to the intent of Article 9 of the Regulations
on Socialist Organisation of Agriculture, are taking away from
the peasants the lands of former landowners’ estates which had
been made over to them. The impermissibility of such practices
is hereby confirmed. Lands being worked by peasants at the time
of the publication of the Regulations on Socialist Organisation
of Agriculture, and which were put at their disposal on the basis of decisions or instructions of uyezd or gubernia land departments,
may not on any account be forcibly alienated for the purpose of
organising state farms, communes or other collective associations.
The alienation of lands from the peasants for the sake of the
above-mentioned organisations is permissible only by voluntary consent
by way of land tenure regulation. Measures of coercion to make
the peasants practise joint cultivation and join communes and
other types of collective farming are impermissible. The
transition to collective forms is to be carried out only in strict
conformity with the Regulations, without any compulsion on the part of
the authorities. Non-fulfilment of the present instruction will be
punished in accordance with the laws of the revolutionary period.
Inform the population of the present instruction as widely as
possible.

“ Lenin “Chairman, Council of People’s Commissars “ Sereda
“People’s Commissar for Agriculture “April 9, 1919.”