Dictated: Dictated by phone on December 21, 1921
Published:
First published in 1933 in Lenin Miscellany XXIII.
Printed from a typewritten copy.
Source:
Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
1976,
Moscow,
Volume 45,
pages 415b-416a.
Translated: Yuri Sdobnikov
Transcription\Markup:
R. Cymbala
Public Domain:
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• README
Comrade Steklov, Editor,
and Comrade A. Belyakov,
Izvestia Editorial Board
On December 20, Izvestia carried A. Belyakov’s article, “New Ways of Reviving Railway Transport”.[1] Will the author of the article inform me, giving the most precise indication possible of the corresponding publications:
1) What is the source of the information that the method of using the ordinary, slightly modified, lorry instead of a railway locomotive has been tested abroad and has produced excellent results in general?
2) The same thing concerning the fact that in America such lorries have been used on sidings.
3) About such lorries being successfully used in the American army during the war (there must be information about this, if the use was successful, in the American, French and British press).
4) About the fact that trials were staged in London on the Russian engineer Kuznetsov’s idea, which have proved that a 30 h.p. lorry easily pulled a 9–10 car train at a speed of 20 versts an hour.[2]
[1] The article described the use of diesel locomotives abroad and expressed the opinion that they could and should be widely used on railways in Soviet Russia.
[2] Over the text of Lenin’s letter, C.P.C. secretary Natalya Lepeshinskaya wrote: “To the State Planning Commission (Presidium), to the S.E.C.’s Scientific and Technical Department, to the People’s Commissariat for Railways. P.S. Comrade Lenin wants to know whether anything has been said about this in scientific and technical literature and what is the view taken of this by specialists?” See also this volume, Documents 568, 611 and 613.
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