Written: Written on May 6, 1918
Published:
First published in 1929 in Lenin Miscellany XI.
Printed from the original.
Source:
Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
1975,
Moscow,
Volume 44,
page 84b.
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
In the Ukraine there has been a coup d’état.[1]
Bourgeois-landowner rule completely restored.
Rostov-on-Don taken by the Germans.[2]
British threaten with a British and Japanese offensive.
Germans demand the seizure of Ino by the Finns and the Murmansk railway to fight the British.[3]
We are holding emergency meeting of C.C. of the Party on all this.[4]
Your policy is to exert all efforts to hasten the conclusion of an armistice and peace, at the price, of course, of new annexations.
[1] This refers to the dismissal of the Central Rada by the German occupationists and the establishment in the Ukraine of an open dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and landowners. On April 29, 1918, at a congress of kulaks and landowners in Kiev convened by the interventionists, General P. P. Skoropadsky, a big Ukrainian landowner and former aide-de-camp to the Tsar, was proclaimed Hetman of the Ukraine.
[2] On May 6, 1918, German and whiteguard army units broke into Rostov-on-Don and occupied the city. On May 7, it was liberated by Soviet troops, but on May 8 it was re-occupied by German and whiteguard troops.
[3] Ino—a fort on the border with Finland which, with Kronstadt, guarded the approaches to Petrograd. Under a treaty between the R.S.F.S.R. and the Finnish Socialist Workers’ Republic, Fort Ino was seceded to the R.S.F.S.R. for the defence of the joint interests of the Socialist Republics. After the defeat of the revolution in Finland, the Finnish bourgeois government with the support of the German imperialists demanded that Fort Ino be handed over to Finland. Before it was abandoned, the main works of the fort were blown up by order of the Commandant of the Kronstadt fortress. In May 1918, Finnish troops occupied Fort Ino.
[4] An emergency meeting of the Party Central Committee on May 6, 1918, discussed the international situation of the Soviet Republic in connection with the aggravation of relations with Germany, who demanded that Fort Ino be handed over to bourgeois Finland, and also in connection with the British occupation of Murmansk and the preparations by the interventionist troops to advance into the interior of the country. The Central Committee adopted the decision on the international situation proposed by Lenin (see present edition, Vol. 27, pp. 355 and 379–80).
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