V. I.   Lenin

632

To:   THE PEOPLE’S COMMISSARIAT FOR HEALTH^[2]

Written: Written on July 8, 1920
Published: First published in 1945 in Lenin Miscellany XXXV. Printed from the typewritten text signed by Lenin.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1975, Moscow, Volume 44, page 400^b.
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

According to information in my possession you have in storage film for cinema work that is not being used.

In view of the acute need of the Cinema Department of the People’s Commissariat for Education and a series of urgent works in hand of great agitational importance, please turn over at least part of your store to the Cinema Department of the People’s Commissariat for Education.^[1]

V. Ulyanov (Lenin)
Chairman, Council of People’s Commissars

Notes

[1] Lydia Fotieva added to this document the words: “On the instruction of V. I., please report fulfilment. L. Fotieva.”—Ed.

[2] Written in connection with a letter from the Cinema Department of the People’s Commissariat for Education, which reported that the fulfilment of Lenin’s directive—for making a motion picture of “The Trial of the Kolchak Ministers”—was being held up owing to the absence of film.

Lenin sent similar letters to Centrosoyuz, the Moscow Extraordinary Commission, the People’s Commissariat for Military Affairs and the Vecheka. On July 9 a reply was received from the Vecheka addressed to the secretary of the Council of People’s Commissars, Lydia Fotieva, reading: “Dear Comrade Fotieva, please tell Vladimir Ilyich that there is no cinema film, in the Vecheka, other than shot films of a counter-revolutionary nature which cannot be used. Apparently, someone who did not know the facts has misled Ilyich” = (Collected Works, Fifth Ed., Vol. 51, pp. 437–38).