Date: 1920-03-04
Source: ru:LS/v38

1920

Two thousand horses, along with a contingent of camels—mobilized for this purpose in the Pugachevsk and Uralsk regions—supplied the division’s baggage train with fodder, while urgent construction of the Alexandrov-Gai–Emba railway was undertaken under the direction of Chief Engineer Budassi, in Saratov. Please provide your immediate feedback.
—V.I. Lenin, Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars

Printed from a typewritten manuscript signed by V.I. Lenin.

13135
TELEGRAM TO THE PEOPLE’S COMMISSARIAT OF HEALTH
[March 3, 1920]

Operational Telegram
To the People’s Commissariat of Health
Copy to Moscow; to the Chief of the State Sanitary Administration;
to Saratov; to Algembá

The question has been raised regarding the urgent dispatch of personnel to the operational front at Algembá, under the command of Chief Engineer Budassi in Saratov: fifteen physicians, thirty paramedics, twenty nurses—with all necessary equipment, medications, and disinfection chambers—given the complete absence of medical supplies on site and the severe typhoid epidemic raging there. Please provide your immediate response.*
—V.I. Lenin, Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars

Printed from a typewritten manuscript signed by V.I. Lenin.

By early April 1920, two epidemic control detachments and two sanitary detachments had arrived to work on the Alexandrov-Gai–Emba railway, along with fifteen physicians, one hundred medical assistants, and nurses. The chief of the medical service of the 4th Army assumed responsibility for all sanitary measures.

13155
INSCRIPTION ON A TELEGRAM FROM L.D. TROTSKY¹
[March 1920, no earlier than the 4th]
I have no objection to Shorin retaining his title as “Deputy Chief of the High Command.”
10*

The conspicuous absence of news concerning Budyonny and the 10th and 11th Armies…³
1 In a telegram addressed to E.M. Sklyansky, Deputy People’s Commissar for Military Affairs and Deputy Chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic, L.D. Trotsky reported that the High Command had proposed summoning V.I. Shorin to work in Siberia. Trotsky requested that this matter be discussed in the Organizational Bureau, asking in what capacity—perhaps as an authorized representative of the Revolutionary Military Council—to place Shorin within the Siberian Revolutionary Committee and to appoint him to oversee the district and its military commands, with the aim of restoring order.
2 V.I. Shorin served as Commander-in-Chief of the Siberian Forces from 1920 to 1921.
3 Attached to this text are notes from E.M. Sklyansky. Regarding S.M. Budyonny and the 10th Army, Sklyansky wrote: “They were present, but clearly making only slow progress”; concerning the 11th Army, he noted: “They were present—and they did make some progress.”
S.M. Budyonny had been a member of the RCP(b) since 1919. During the years of foreign military intervention and the Civil War, he commanded a cavalry corps, then the 1st Cavalry Army.
26218
NOTE TO N.N. KRESTINSKY¹
March 10 [1920]
Comrade Krestinsky!
This is an extremely urgent matter—the sentence of execution against Kiselev.
I had seen him in Zurich between 1910 and 1914, where he was a Plekhanovist and was accused of numerous vile acts (though I do not know the details).
I saw Kiselev briefly here in Moscow in 1918 or 1919. Kiselev worked at Izvestia and told me that he was becoming a Bolshevik. I do not know the facts.
Please arrange a call with Kamenev².
—Lenin
1 The note was written in response to the sentence handed down to I. Kiselev in Kyiv. Kiselev had been charged with remaining in Kyiv during the occupation without the Party’s permission and collaborating with the occupying authorities.
2 In his reply, N.N. Krestinsky, Secretary of the Central Committee of the RCP(b), informed V.I. Lenin that L.B. Kamenev had opposed the execution and had demanded that the case be reconsidered. Krestinsky himself refrained from taking any decision, as he had never personally known Kiselev. Should a decision be made to suspend the execution of the sentence, Krestinsky wrote, a telegram should be sent immediately to Kyiv via F.E. Dzerzhinsky.

1920

In response to this note from N.N. Krestinsky, V.I. Lenin wrote: “I have not yet read Bergmann’s report, so I am unable to vote. Let Comrade Dzerzhinsky decide after consulting with Krestinsky.”
F.E. Dzerzhinsky wrote in the margin of this text: “I am against interference. —F. Dzerzhinsky.”
25483
REPORT ON THE INTERNATIONAL AND ECONOMIC SITUATION OF RUSSIA AT THE 17TH MOSCOW GOVERNORATE CONFERENCE¹
March 13, 1920

The international position of our Republic has never been better than it is today—however strange that may sound to an assembly of people who are acutely aware of, and deeply feel, the gravity of the current situation, especially when the end of winter brought unprecedented cold and utter deprivation.

Strangely enough, objective evidence unequivocally shows that we have achieved the most decisive victory over the Entente—that is, over all the wealthiest capitalist nations. The more often we examine the reports of the bourgeois press—both Western European and American—especially those of the capitalist press and of that segment of it most hostile to the Soviet Republic—the clearer becomes the tremendous victory we have won… When they resolved to throw every resource into aiding Yudenich, Kolchak, and Denikin, they fully understood that they were fighting against revolution at home, fighting against world revolution. Over the course of two years of struggle, they poured hundreds of millions in gold into supporting the Russian White Guards, establishing schools for Russian officers and transferring thousands of their own men into White Guard armies, sending thousands of Russian prisoners of war to those forces. The White Guards received support from every powerful state that dominated the globe. There is not a single corner of the earth where American influence does not extend—whether as financial power, as banking authority, or as military might. The German navy had once been America’s sole rival, but now that America is building an immense fleet and England stands in alliance with her, no nation could hope to challenge them at sea. From a military standpoint, the struggle seemed hopeless, for even today these powers vastly outstrip us in strength. Had they…

been able to unleash the military might at their disposal against us, the fate of Soviet Russia would have been sealed within a matter of months.
And yet we emerged victorious, because all the great powers were forced to withdraw their troops. Now, after the blockade has been lifted and the barriers removed, they stumble over one another—and the only power still standing against us is Poland.
Polish landowners are rattling their weapons with all their might. We know full well that trains carrying arms arrive in Warsaw from Western Europe almost daily. It is clear, of course, that Western European imperialism is unwilling to discard the vast quantities of iron and steel that have been cast into shells, cannons, and the like. As one journalist put it in a newspaper: “If we were to try to sell these cannons and shells on the market, we wouldn’t get a single kopeck; but if we sell them to Kolchak and Denikin, we’ll turn a handsome profit—after all, if we earned one ruble per ruble when we supplied all this to our own state, we might now earn ten rubles for every ruble.” From a commercial perspective, from the standpoint of free trade—our Mensheviks still cling to this view—it was inevitable that they would lose everything anyway. And when all of this recently came entirely under our control, the capitalists threw up their hands and said: “Our merchants have miscalculated—they’ve thrown away hundreds of millions of rubles; it would have been better if they’d sunk it all, as the Germans did with their ships—but they did worse: they handed it over to the Bolsheviks” (applause). Today, trade proceeds in such a way that cannons and rifles are shipped to Warsaw day after day, delivered to Polish landowners and capitalists who can pay only in the form of land, selling shares wholesale and retail.

So far, they have managed to deceive the Polish masses—because Poland had been oppressed under tsarist rule, and the hatred toward “Muscovites” still lives on there. But Poland is a country utterly ruined, to the last degree. You know that Poland suffered from the imperialist war far more than other nations. Russian and German armies marched across its territory countless times; entire villages were destroyed. In this devastated land, landowners and capitalists attempt to hold on by accepting arms from the Entente, surrendering land and shares, hoping to secure reinforcements for their troops—but they themselves do not know whether they will fight or not. The situation is such that no one knows—neither we nor the Polish representatives—whether they will go to war or not. Yet in order to obtain more supplies, they pretend,

1920

that they wish to fight. Many parties preach that war against the Bolsheviks is necessary; they tell us, as a capitalist country, that we cannot coexist with Soviet Russia—either we or they. This is how Polish landowners reason. From this perspective, they preach war against Russia, sacrificing their own interests, the interests of their money bags. But the Polish petty bourgeoisie does not want war, just as the Polish proletariat does not want war. For if the entire Polish petty bourgeoisie desired to fight, common sense would dictate that they should have aided Denikin when he stood before Orel. But what would have been the result? Denikin—in Russia, a tsarist general, a landowner—would have reinstated the same policies pursued by the Russian capitalists, policies that Kerensky had continued alongside the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries: the policy of refusing to recognize autonomous small states, the policy that led to the secret treaty exposed by the Bolsheviks—when landowners were promised Constantinople and the Dardanelles in exchange for victory over the Germans. Denikin’s victory would have been a defeat for Poland, for France would never have come to Poland’s defense.
France needed tsarist Russia in order to protect itself, to remain a threat to Germany. France desired nothing more than the restoration of monarchy in Russia. England feared tsarist Russia because England had been Russia’s chief ally. At one time, they had divided Persia between them, but now England intends to “consume” all of Persia; England seeks to “consume” nearly all of the Caucasus. Our victory over Denikin had the effect of turning France against England. Intrigues arose between France and England—and though they call themselves the League of Nations, in reality they are two dogs fighting over a single bone. On paper, they speak of a league of nations, of the League of Nations, and of other such organizations—but in practice, they lack any real unity.
We enjoy the support of workers from every country. The workers of France and Germany refused to fight against us. English soldiers were withdrawn from Arkhangelsk. Our broad front grows stronger, while our enemies fight among themselves like rabid dogs. It is precisely this that enabled us to wage war for two years in a country that had been utterly devastated—after the imperialist war, we endured a civil war sustained by landowners and capitalists from around the world—and yet we emerged victorious.
Many ask: What was the cause of the war? In the past, people were reluctant to raise this question, but we cannot maintain censorship indefinitely. And so revelations begin to emerge.
What we accomplished immediately is now gradually coming to light in countries across Europe and in America.

Last year, an American named Bullitt visited us, and we told him that we were prepared to make territorial concessions in the event of peace… When Lloyd George² was asked whether it was true that he had been offered such a peace, he lied, claiming that he had never heard of any such peace. Then, in America, Bullitt published a book in which he printed the text of our draft treaty. Thus, the imperialists were exposed by Bullitt as the ultimate fools. They rejected peace, wagering hundreds of millions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives—and lost everything. Recently, in France, negotiations were published that had been initiated by the former Austrian monarch with France, offering her peace. At that time, Tomáš Masaryk³ was in France. He knew about these negotiations, but he concealed them—and France lost so much that no nation could ever repay her. Revelations show that peace was possible in 1916, but the capitalists did not want it. Today, the imperialist nations find themselves in a position where they are unwilling to make peace with the Bolsheviks.
But we say that there is not a single country where the word “Bolshevik” and the word “Soviet” are unknown—and where workers do not stand firmly on the side of Soviet power. It is this very fact that deprived the Entente of the ability to wage war against us. Such is the essence of the international situation.
Outwardly, they all appear strong—but in truth, they are powerless; they have no soldiers. Revelations between them unfold day by day, and the struggle takes on the character of mutual exposure.
Japan took the least part in the war and grew richer than any other nation. Of all the countries, America had not seen a single soldier on its own soil—and the richest of all nations, France and England, found themselves in debt up to their necks. Before the war, America owed money to France and England; after the war, they found themselves in debt to America. Until now, workers and peasants were told: “The Germans will pay.” But even fools can see that no matter how much Germany is plundered, Germany will never pay—after all, you cannot rob a hungry man.
Bankruptcy approaches with each passing year. Billions must be paid to capitalists and landowners simply for allowing workers to cut their own throats. They are heading toward collapse far more quickly than anyone could have imagined. All of them are fragmented, while we emerge unified—not only within Soviet Russia, but beyond its borders as well.
Poland continues to threaten us; Finland has replaced its Ministry of Defense with a more pacifist, less militaristic ministry—and there, too, they rattle their weapons. How much serious intent lies behind this remains unclear, but they maintain a military consensus. Therefore, we cannot demobilize our army and must move all troops westward—a task that is extraordinarily difficult, because the question…

1920

of transportation is daunting; transport infrastructure is in ruins. We know that the Japanese are waiting for the moment when our soldiers move further east—but the war with Kolchak complicates the transfer to the Western Front.
And so we must tell our soldiers:
“Wait!”
It is pleasant to liberate Chita after Nizhneudinsk—of course, it is pleasant—but we must endure the struggle with our commanders, who still wish to march another hundred versts, saying that only then will we reach the final destination. Yet we must say: it doesn’t matter if we gain Siberia in six months—it doesn’t matter; what matters is salvation from war with Poland. If the situation develops in this way, Polish landowners will rattle their weapons, but they will not dare to fight. As the old saying goes: “If you prepare for war, you will achieve peace.”
The devastation of our transport system has reached monstrous proportions. Even in the wealthiest nations, the state of transport has deteriorated to the point where passenger traffic is being reduced. Countries that emerged victorious, collecting tribute from the defeated—yet even in these nations, war brought ruin to transport infrastructure. In Russia, this devastation was compounded by the fact that bridges were blown up by both Whites and Reds. The Don region, the North Caucasus, and many other areas changed hands repeatedly, each time accompanied by destruction. Given the impossibility of demobilizing our army, given the difficult circumstances—when the entire country had already sacrificed itself to the war and everything lay in ruins—it was only natural that our slogans be shaped by this very reality. Our economic condition is dire; it does not allow us to undertake large-scale projects.
If French and English soldiers fought against us and we emerged victorious, then all the more reason we should win on the home front—but this struggle is far longer, a struggle that cannot be waged on the battlefield… Two years ago, after the October Revolution, we had ten to twelve million bayonets, but we did not have an army. The old army had disintegrated—and it was good that it had disintegrated, for it could only support landowners and capitalists. New armies did not arise overnight; months passed before we learned, guided by communists, to create an army that would bear sacrifices beyond anything previously imagined. No segment of the population had borne as many sacrifices as the worker-communists; never before had the number of fallen comrades been so great as the number of cadets from the communist ranks—and even the officers, the colonels of the old army who had served us, expressed wonder and said: “Even a hundredth of what a soldier endures today, he could not have endured under the Tsar or the capitalists.” And the colonels who looked at things—and their consequences—soberly, though not as communists, said that this army won because it…

knew what it was fighting for. Our army knew that it fought solely for its own interests. That was what decided the war. But it took months of hard labor—and on no front did we achieve victory immediately. Denikin advanced to Orel, and after a crushing defeat, drawing upon all our strength, we were finally able to secure victory.
Now, having accumulated all the experience we gained during the war, we must carry that experience over to the labor front. Here, we cannot proceed mechanically; the fundamental relationship between classes remains unchanged. In war, we prevailed because the masses followed the workers—indeed, military specialists, old generals and colonels of the old tsarist bourgeois army, who had betrayed and defected countless times, and who, with each betrayal, saw thousands of soldiers perish—yet we still produced tens of thousands of generals and officers, who formed our army, not as communists, but preserving their sympathy for capitalists, maintaining a negative attitude toward Bolshevism; living in a military environment, consciously supporting peasants and workers, they were reborn. This fundamental relationship between the communists who led the proletariat and the bourgeois specialists—this fundamental relationship we put into practice, and we must apply it, with appropriate adjustments, to the tasks that lie before us.
Unfortunately, I have strayed somewhat from my topic and must now speak briefly about economic labor, about the significance of labor armies, about trade unions, about the principles of association, and about the collegial system of governance. As for labor armies, why is militarization necessary? It is necessary for two reasons. Our armies are large—we cannot deploy them all at once, because our transport infrastructure is in ruins; we must utilize them where they are, taking into account the habits that have taken root, and we must restore economic life. We have bread—millions of poods—and we cannot deliver it; the absence of bread creates not only the torment of hunger, but also the impossibility of any construction whatsoever. When we achieve victories on the front, we must move on to other tasks—and we cannot ignore this reality in our current struggle. Too many mistakes are made when we reason about the overall situation while failing to take into account the specific conditions we face today. We have large armies, larger than necessary—but we cannot either disband them or quickly redeploy them to the required front. Therefore, we must make use of them. This is one of the reasons we plundered all institutions, saying: “Everything for the Red Army.” We spared nothing for the Red Army and said: “No matter how great the sacrifices, we must defeat those who bring victory to the capital—”

1920

the capitalists—for only then can we safeguard the country’s economy. This is a sound line of reasoning—and it is precisely through this that workers and peasants demonstrated their solidarity with Soviet power, by shifting to the side of Soviet authority. Thus did the working masses act in solidarity; this solidarity was given, and for the sake of the Red Army, we could take even the last resources from a country that was already in the greatest depths of ruin.
Now that we have endured two years of struggle, the country finds itself in an even more devastated state. We said: “Everything for war.” If war is just, waged for the sake of the workers and peasants—then everything for total victory; spare nothing, act with military discipline. When we speak of the dictatorship of the proletariat, we mean a unified will: that all measures, all clearly defined goals, all firmly established objectives, move toward that goal, so that no one can distract or hold us back. We stand in a death struggle with our mortal enemy—and whoever is not with us is against us. Now we must overcome devastation; this enemy is no less deadly—it brings hunger and cold—and it is an even more dangerous enemy, for the country lies in deeper exhaustion than ever before. The war has ended on the bloody front; the war continues on the bloodless front. This war is as merciless and as cruel as any other war—and there is no time for doubt or for idle speculation; we will not allow it… In short, everything must be sacrificed to this goal, for it is clear to all that after two years of war, the country is even more hungry. We have not experienced such a harrowing end as the end of the nineteenth * year. The country is now so devastated, hunger is so severe, everyone is barefoot and half-naked—Russia has never before reached such levels of devastation, and it cannot continue to exist in this state. Therefore, the war continues; we must pour all our energy into the struggle, acting as the proletariat did: whoever hinders us, we will remove; the proletariat must lead, to wrench the working masses from the yoke of landowners and capitalists… Therefore, when need reaches its most extreme point, this militarization becomes a necessary foundation; to act with methods that reach directly into the midst of masses who are so weary, so impoverished, driven to despair—this is difficult, and here we must act as we did in war, marching steadily forward and allowing no one even the slightest hesitation. We could not afford to debate: victory or defeat—and the front ranks of communists marched forward, securing victory over an enemy far stronger than themselves. We must act in the same way now—and this is why…
* The transcript mistakenly reads “twentieth.”