V. I.

Lenin

544

To:   S. Y. CHUTSKAYEV

5/III.

Comrade Chutskayev, Especially urgent measures must be adopted to speed up
the sorting of valuables. [1] If we are too late, they will
give nothing for them in Europe and America.

In Moscow, a thousand Party members, etc., can ( and should ) be mobilised for this work under special control.

At your end, evidently, the whole business is dragging woefully .

Write what extraordinary measures you are taking to speed things up.

Lenin

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Notes:
[1]
This refers to valuable antiques, luxury articles and works of
art that had been nationalised. In February 1919, Maxim Gorky
set up a committee of experts in Petrograd to select and value
these articles. Up to October 1, 1920, this committee, consisting
of 80 persons, had selected, as Gorky wrote, “120,000 various
articles” ( V. I. Lenin i A. M. Gorky . Pisma, vospominaniya, dokumenty [V. I. Lenin and A. M. Gorky. Letters, Recollections,
Documents], 1961, p. 164). This work, however, progressed
extremely slowly. On Gorky’s letter, Lenin wrote: “only 8 stores
out of 33 have been gone through” (ibid.).