Letter to Alexey Svidersky, Between February and early March 1919

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I think all of you were wasting time “theorising”. Rush Schlichter, hurry him out to the spot. Things will be clearer on the spot.[1]

  1. Written by Lenin on a note from A. I. Svidersky, member of the Board of the People’s Commissariat for Food, apparently at a meeting of the Council of People’s Commissars. Svidersky wrote that the Food Commissariat had been discussing whether to consider the frontier with the Ukraine open for free transport of all food products or only of those that wore unrationed.
    The organisation of food supply in the liberated districts of the Ukraine at the beginning of 1919 was a very important matter. Lenin devoted great attention to this question; in particular, he proposed to hasten Schlichter’s departure to the Ukraine, where he was to head the People’s Commissariat for Food. On February 25, 1919, Lenin wrote on a telegram from Pyatakov, who reported on food stocks in the Ukraine: “Inform Schlichter, adding that I am extremely dissatisfied at the delay of his journey” (A. Schlichter, Uchitel i drug trudyashchikhsya [Teacher and Friend of the Working People], Moscow, 1957, p. 55). On February 19 and March 11,1919, the CC, RCP(b) adopted special decisions on food policy in the Ukraine (see Collected Works, Fifth Ed., Vol. 37, pp. 522, 630–31).