Telegram to Leon Trotsky, February 19, 1920

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In code

Trotsky

Copy to Smirnov, R.M.C. 5

also in code

I fully support your reply to Smirnov. We must vehemently denounce the opponents of a buffer state[1] (it seems that Frumkin is such an opponent), threaten to bring them before a Party court, and demand that everyone in Siberia carry out the slogan: “not a step farther east, all-out efforts to hasten the movement of troops and locomotives to the west, to Russia”. We would be idiots to allow ourselves to be drawn into a stupid movement into the heart of Siberia, permitting Denikin meanwhile to revive and the Poles to strike. It would be a crime.

Lenin

  1. ↑ This refers to the formation of the Far Eastern Republic as a buffer state. The F.E.R. was established in April 1920 on the territory of the Trans-Baikal, Amur, Primorye, and Kamchatka regions and Northern Sakhalin. The formation of the F.E.R.—a state which, though bourgeois-democratic in form, carried out a Soviet policy—was in the interests of Soviet Russia, which sought to obtain a long respite on the Eastern Front and to avoid war with Japan.
    After the territories of the Far East (with the exception of Northern Sakhalin) had been cleared of interventionists and whiteguards, the People’s Assembly of the Far Eastern Republic on November 14, 1922, passed a decision to unite with the RSFSR On November 15, 1922, the All-Russia CEC announced the incorporation of the Far Eastern Republic into the RSFSR