Written: Written on December 16, 1918
Published:
First published in 1965 in Collected Works, Fifth Ed., Vol. 50.
Printed from the original.
Source:
Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
1975,
Moscow,
Volume 44,
page 173b.
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
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• README
Sverdlov,
for your information
Yesterday, 15/XII, Bukharin told me that, as testified by Yem. Yaroslavsky, Spiridonova is conducting party propaganda.[1]
[1] Lenin’s note to Sverdlov was written on a telegram from N. N. Kuzmin, Military Commissar of the 6th Army, who had reported that Left Socialist-Revolutionary agitation was being conducted among the troops of the Northern Front, as a result of which discipline in some units was deteriorating.
As regards Spiridonova, a leader of the Left Socialist– Revolutionary Party, Lenin’s note probably refers to her speeches at outdoor and indoor meetings, against Soviet power, against the Bolsheviks. On February 24, 1919, the Moscow Revolutionary Tribunal examined the case of Maria Spiridonova, who was accused of counter-revolutionary agitation and slander against Soviet power. The charges against Spiridonova were proved at the trial, but in view of the “morbidly hysterical state of the accused”, the tribunal decided “to isolate Maria Spiridonova from political and social activity for one year by confining her in a sanatorium and affording her an opportunity for healthy physical and mental labour” (Pravda No. 43, February 25, 1919).
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