Published:
First published in 1933 in Lenin Miscellany XXIII.
Printed from the original.
Source:
Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
1976,
Moscow,
Volume 45,
page 375a.
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
12.XI.1921
Comrade Gorbunov:
Please read the enclosure and send on to Comrade Alsky for a study by him and members of the People’s Commissariat for Finance Collegium, and then on to Comrade Kamenev, chairman of a commission which will probably deal with the matter as well.[1]
I first met Chebotaryov in the 1880s, in the case of my elder brother, Alexander Ilyich Ulyanov, who was hanged in 1887. Chebotaryov is undoubtedly an honest man. In the epoch of the first revolution and after he was politically a Cadet, but not an active one. I believe that his honesty can and must be relied upon. He now seems to be politically close to Smena Vekh.[2]
[1] A reference to a report from I. N. Chebotaryov, a member of the Governing Committee of the State Savings Banks before the October Revolution, addressed to the Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars on November 7, 1921. Chebotaryov said there was need to reopen the state savings banks in order to attract money in the hands of the population.
The savings banks wore established by a C.P.C. decision of December 26, 1922 (published in Izvestia VTsIK, December 29, 1922).
[2] Smena Vekh (Change of Landmarks)—a weekly journal published in Paris from October 1921 to March 1922 by a group of whiteguard émigré intellectuals, which also issued a collection entitled Smena Vekh in Prague in July 1921. The Smena Vekh trend was named after the collection and the journal. Realising that it was quite hopeless to overthrow the Soviet power through foreign armed intervention, the Smena Vekh followers came out in favour of co-operation with the Soviet power in the hope of its degeneration into a bourgeois state. Some of them were honestly desirous of promoting Russia’s economic rehabilitation.
| | | | | | |