Written: Written on February 16, 1918
Published:
First published in 1942 in Lenin Miscellany XXXIV.
Printed from the original.
Source:
Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
1975,
Moscow,
Volume 44,
page 65b.
Translated: Clemens Dutt
Transcription\Markup:
R. Cymbala
Public Domain:
Lenin Internet Archive.
You may freely copy, distribute,
display and perform this work, as well as make derivative and
commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet
Archive” as your source.
• README
Governmental. Secret
Chairman of the Regional M.R.C. of the Don Region
Voronezh
Have received your telegram of 31/1[1] concerning, the capture of Shakhtnaya and Kamenolomni. I congratulate the Soviet troops on their success. I particularly thank you for the news of the dispatch of 60 waggons of coal through Tsaritsyn and earnestly request you to inform us by telegraph of the numbers of trains with coal and grain and the precise days and hours of dispatch. It is extremely important. Send more grain. The letter of Alexeyev’s spy has not yet been received. Send it by hand through a very reliable person, after taking a photograph of it.[2]
Lenin
Chairman, Council of People’s Commissars
[1] February 13, 1918, new style.—Ed.
[2] This refers to General Alexeyev’s letter to the French Mission in Kiev, which was intercepted in Novokhopersk. It was published on February 19, 1918, in Izvestia No. 28. In the letter, General Alexeyev asked the French Mission for assistance in the struggle against the Soviet state, since his troops were sustaining heavy defeats and were forced to withdraw from the Don territory. In describing the situation in the Don and Kuban regions, Alexeyev had to admit that he had been mistaken in counting on the Cossacks. “The ideas of Bolshevism,” he wrote, “have found supporters among the broad mass of Cossacks.”
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