Letter to Joseph Stalin, January 19, 1922

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19/I.

Comrade Stalin:

If you decide to send Frumkin to the Ukraine, Krasin should be sent an extra-vigorous telegram:

Unless you buy 15 million poods of grain in January and February, we shall dismiss you from your office and expel you from the Party. There is a desperate need for grain. Red tape is intolerable. The Vneshtorg apparatus is bad. There are delays over foreign currency. Do everything you possibly can. Telegraph precisely on the execution twice a week. Approve this tomorrow, 20/I, and send on behalf of the Politbureau,[1] in addition put all the pressure possible on Litvinov (for the sake of currency) and check up personally 2 or 3 times a week.[2]

Lenin

  1. On January 20, 1922, the Politbureau of the RCP(b) Central Committee recognised the need to intensify the delivery of grain from the Ukraine and adopted a decision to send Deputy People’s Commissar for Food, M. I. Frumkin, to the Ukraine with special powers.
    The same decision also approved, with some amendments (instead of “dismiss from office and expel from the Party”—“the Party will be forced to take the most drastic measures of punishment”), the draft telegram to L. B. Krasin proposed by Lenin. (Central Party Archives of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the CPSU Central Committee).
  2. Deputy People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, M. M. Litvinov, was concurrently CPC representative for currency operations.