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Special pages :
Letter to Alexei Rykov, April 5, 1922
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1976, Moscow, Volume 45, page 522-524.
Comrade Rykov
Copy to Comrade Tsyurupa
Copy to the CPC Managing Department
This business of a concession granted to Rutgers and a group of American workers, as Martens informs me, is in a very bad state. This requires a check-up and serious attention. It is an exceptional concession granted by us to American workers by special permission of the Politbureau.
The whole undertaking may go to pieces without special support and check-up.
Please ask Martens for information and strictly check up on the whole course of this business.
Lenin
Dictated by phone on April 5, 1922
Comrade Rykov
Copy to Comrade Tsyurupa
Copy to the CPC Managing Department
Please pay attention to the concession of the American Hammer, who is now in Russia, as Reinstein, who knows him personally, has informed me.
According to Martens, we’ve already made one great blunder, to put it mildly, namely: the goods sent to America under the contract with Hammer by the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Trade turned out to be of bad quality. We must demand information about this business both from the P.C.F.T. and the SEC and also from Comrade Reinstein, who knows Hammer personally. We must see to it that our obligations under this concession are performed with absolute strictness and accuracy, and in general we must pay greater attention to the whole business.[1]
Lenin
Dictated by phone on April 5, 1922
This letter deals with the exploration of the Kursk Magnetic Anomaly (KMA).
Comrade Rykov
Copy to Comrade Tsyurupa
Copy to the CPC Managing Department
I draw your attention to the exceptional importance of the work of exploring the Kursk Magnetic Anomaly. Comrade Krzhizhanovsky has informed me, that, according to the engineers with whom he has talked, it has been Virtually proved that we have there an incredibly rich reserve of pure iron. Comrade Martens believes that it has been proved already. He intends to go there within three weeks. We must discuss whether we should send along with him some engineer from the State Planning Commission with a better knowledge of Russian conditions and who is capable of checking up whether there is no exaggeration of any sort there.
I think we should not let the press have any information about this and should take steps to see that nothing is said about this in the press, because otherwise we may expect that the interventionist plans may very well be intensified. For the same reason, perhaps, it would be better not to have Martens’s report made either to the CPC or the CLD, but to have it heard only by both deputies, Bogdanov and some CC members.
If the report of Martens and the engineer who is to go with him on behalf of the S.P.C. confirms that the matter is serious, we must get the work going as fast as possible, without in any case stinting the necessary gold appropriations, and establishing special supervision to have the necessary equipment received from abroad (diamond, drilling, etc.) with the maximum speed. I very much fear that this business will be carried out without sufficient energy. But the fact is, according to Krzhizhanovsky and Martens, that we have there almost surely a stock of wealth unequalled anywhere in the world, and capable of revolutionising the whole of metallurgy.[2]
Lenin