Published:
First published in Izvestia of the Vesyegonsk Soviet of Workers’, Peasants’ and Red Army Deputies No. 2 (30), January 18, 1919.
Printed from the newspaper text.
Source:
Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
1975,
Moscow,
Volume 44,
pages 181b-182a.
Translated: Clemens Dutt
Transcription\Markup:
R. Cymbala
Public Domain:
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3. I. 1919
Please discuss the question of helping the Vasyutino Committee of the R.C.P. with timber, a financial loan and a library for the restoration of the People’s House destroyed by fire. If help is required from the centre, notify me simultaneously with applications to the appropriate People’s Commissariats.[1]
V. Ulyanov (Lenin)
Chairman, C.P.C.
[1] Written by Lenin following a conversation with F. F. Obraztsov a peasant from Vasyutino village, Lopatinsk Volost, Vesyegonsk Uyezd, Tver Gubernia, who had been sent to Lenin by village Communists to solicit help in building a village People’s House to replace one that was destroyed by fire at the end of 1917.
On January 18, 1919, after Obraztsov’s return home, the local newspaper, Izvestia of the Vesyegonsk Soviet of Workers’, Peasants’ and Red Army Deputies, published an article about his reception by Lenin under the heading “A Visit to Comrade Lenin”. In it Obraztsov related that his talk with Lenin had dealt chiefly with the policy of the Communist Party and the Soviet Government towards the poor and middle peasantry. In concluding the article, Obraztsov wrote: “Comrade peasants of Vesyegonsk Uyezd! Believe me who saw with my own eyes that there, at the top, our common cause is being administered not by officials or bureaucrats, but by our own, ordinary comrades, who rightly call themselves the Workers’ and Peasants’ Government. Let us hearken to their voice. They are working for us and our children. Let us help them with all we can in their difficult work. Then we shall all the sooner see a golden age for us. Comrades! I hope that it is together with you all that I say loudly: ‘Long live the leader of the proletariat and protector of the poor, our friend and brother Vladimir Ilyich Lenin!!!’”
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