Published:
First published in 1965 in Collected Works, Fifth (Russian) Ed., Vol. 54.
Printed from the original.
Source:
Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
1976,
Moscow,
Volume 45,
pages 519-520a.
Translated: Yuri Sdobnikov
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
30.III.1922
I have had a talk with Krasnoshchekov. I see that we, the Politbureau, have made a big mistake.
We have harassed this man, who undoubtedly has brains, energy, knowledge and experience, to a state when one is quite capable of abandoning everything and getting away from the whole thing.
He knows all the languages, English excellently. He has been in the movement since 1896. Fifteen years in America. Started out as a house-painter. Was headmaster of a school. Knows commerce. Has shown himself to be an intelligent chairman of the government in the Far-Eastern Republic, where he organised virtually everything.[1]
We took him away from there. Here we placed him in the People’s Commissariat for Finance, where complete anarchy reigns. Now, just when he was down with the typhus, he has been dismissed!!!
We have done everything possible and impossible to repulse this highly energetic, intelligent and valuable worker.
He has had differences both with the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Trade and the People’s Commissariat for Finance, because he favoured greater “freedom to trade”.
He says: “Let me prove myself at work, allow me to complete it without keeping on at me.” That is, of course, a legitimate desire.
We must make efforts to give him a job at the S.E.C. At any rate, we mast strive at all costs not to lose this worker, but to meet his most legitimate desire: give him a specified job and allow him, say, at least one year of trial, to test him without harassing him. (He says he is willing to work anywhere, provided he is not pulled about.)
(He would like to work at the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs. He has had some differences with Chicherin on the foreign policy of the Far-Eastern Republic.)
[1] The Far-Eastern Republic, a democratic slate founded under Bolshevik leadership during the working people’s struggle against the foreign armed intervention in the Far East. It existed from April 6, 1920 to November 14, 1922. The establishment of the Far-Eastern Republic, a “buffer state” with a bourgeois-democratic system, but essentially conducting a Soviet policy, was in Soviet Russia’s interests as she was anxious to avoid an open armed clash with the Japanese imperialists and wanted to assure herself of a long breathing-space on the Eastern Front.
Following the expulsion of the Japanese interventionists, the People’s Assembly of the Far-Eastern Republic, on November 15, 1922. requested the All-Russia C.E.C. to integrate it with the R.S.F.S.R. and to extend the Soviet Constitution to its territory. On November 15, 1922, the All-Russia C.E.C. declared the Far-Eastern Republic to be an inseparable part of the R.S.F.S.R.
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