RESOLUTION
ON A TELEGRAM FROM MINSK 1
[August 4, 1920]
We must summon Smilga to the direct line and decide immediately: if we cannot provide bread and the like, then we must come to terms with Taribas.
Lenin
1 Written on a telegram addressed to I. T. Smilga, reporting the onset of famine in Vilnius due to the blockade of the city by the bourgeois-nationalist government of Lithuania under Taribas. Smilga had requested that an order be issued to the People’s Commissariat for Food Supplies to dispatch 30,000 poods of grain and funds for the purchase of foodstuffs for the population of Vilnius. In the telegram, Lenin emphasized certain points.
I. T. Smilga had been a member of the Party since 1907. Following the October Socialist Revolution, he held positions of responsibility in both military and Soviet organs.
He repeatedly voiced opposition to the Party’s general line.
At this time, he served as a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Western Front.