Written: Written on August 19, 1918
Published:
First published in 1931 in Lenin Miscellany XVIII.
Sent to Penza.
Printed from the original.
Source:
Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
1975,
Moscow,
Volume 44,
page 134b.
Translated: Clemens Dutt
Transcription\Markup:
R. Cymbala
Public Domain:
Lenin Internet Archive.
You may freely copy, distribute,
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• README
It is stupid to ask whether a People’s Commissar for Finance, and one of a single region at that, can countermand my order. If that order is not carried out, I shall have the guilty persons prosecuted. Leave the company of Letts in Penza for the time being until the suppression in Chembar. Tell all members of the Executive Committee and all Communists that it is their duty ruthlessly to suppress the kulaks and to confiscate all the grain of the insurgents. Your inactivity and weakness is exasperating. I demand detailed reports on the fulfilment of all my orders and especially on the measures of suppression and confiscation.[1]
[1] Transmitted by direct line.—Ed.
[2] Lenin sent this telegram in reply to A. Y. Minkin, Chairman of the Penza Gubernia Executive Committee, who asked whether it was necessary to comply with the order of A. I. Potyaev, People’s Commissar for Finance of the Northern Region, to the Chief of the Stationery Office in Penza that the unloading of the Stationery Office’s train should be held up, contrary to Lenin’s order dated August 16, 1918.
The Left Socialist-Revolutionaries’ revolt in Chembar, an uyezd town in Penza Gubernia, mentioned in the telegram, broke out on the night of August 18. On August 20, the revolt was put down by a detachment of Lettish riflemen and Red Army men, who had arrived from Penza.
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