Letter to Grigori Zinoviev, April 30, 1919

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April 30, 1919

Comrade Zinoviev,

Talking with Comrade Yemelyanov, I was particularly struck by the fact that such best and most reliable Petrograd workers are wasting themselves on technical work like road transport.

This is unforgivable! For technical work we can hire and take ninth-rate men and strangers, i.e., those whose honesty is not known. But men like Yemelyanov should be sent into the countryside, into the administration, into management, into the uyezd executive committees, where honest men are few and far between, where the need for honest men is desperate.

Could we form a sponsoring group of workers in Petrograd, consisting of Comrade Yemelyanov and 5 or 10 of his friends, to select 300–600 Petrograd workers, with the most solid references from the Party and the trade unions, for dispatch, singly or in pairs, to uyezd executive committees throughout Russia?

I should support this plan in every possible way. All such men (too old to go to the front) should be taken off technical work and posts where they can be replaced, and transferred to administrative work in the countryside. Without a group of such absolutely reliable and experienced Petrograd workers we shall not be able to bring about any big improvement in the villages.

Greetings,

Lenin