Letter to Mikhail Frunze, May 18, 1921

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Author(s) Lenin
Written 18 May 1921
First published in part in 1826 in the book, I. K. Yeroshkin and A. F. Khavin, Solepromyshlennost i soletorgovlya SSSR (Salt Industry and Trade of the USSR), Moscow-Leningrad. Published in full in 1965 in Collected Works, Fifth (Russian) Ed., Vol. 52. Printed from a typewritten text signed by Lenin.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1976, Moscow, Volume 45, pages 145b-146a.
Keywords : Letter, Mikhail Frunze

Comrade Frunze

Copies to Comrades Petrovsky and Rakovsky

and the Ukrainian C.P. CC[1]

18.V.1921

Comrade Bukharin says the crop in the south is excellent.

The main question for the whole of Soviet power, a lifeand-death question for us, is to collect 200–300 million poods in the Ukraine.

The main requirement for this is salt. Everything should be taken over, all the areas of extraction should, be ringed with a triple cordon of troops, not a pound should be let through or allowed to be stolen.

This is a matter of life and death.

Put this on a military footing. Appoint persons specifically responsible for each operation. Let me have a list of them (everything through the Central Salt Administration).

You are the Commander-in-Chief of salt.

The responsibilities are all yours.[2]

V. Ulyanov (Lenin)

Chairman, Council of Labour and Defence

  1. ↑ scan darker
  2. ↑ That same day, May 18, 1921, Lenin signed the Narrow C.P.C. decision “to authorise the People’s Commissariat for Finance to place at the disposal of Comrade Frunze, representative of the Council of Labour and Defence, 100 million rubles from the S.E.C. funds for urgent expenditures in May on the transportation of salt from the Ukraine and the Crimea” (Central Party Archives of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the C.P.S.U. Central Committee). Another of Lenin’s notes to Frunze appears to refer to this period:. “What have you managed to do about the salt? Who is responsible for the salt? Lenin” (Lenin Miscellany XXXIV, p. 414): At the Central Party Archives there is also a memo sent in by Frunze to the C.L.D. Chairman in July 1921, reporting on the state of transporting salt from the Crimea and the Ukraine and giving the actual figures for May and June and prospects for July 1921. On the memo is Lenin’s remark: “To the archives, on salt transportation, from Frunze.”
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