Dictated: Dictated by phone
Published:
First published in 1933 in Lenin Miscellany XXIII.
Printed from a typewritten copy.
Source:
Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
1976,
Moscow,
Volume 45,
page 416b.
Translated: Yuri Sdobnikov
Transcription\Markup:
R. Cymbala
Public Domain:
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Comrade Molotov:
I think that we should agree right away, and to make sure send a telegram about this both through Krasin, and via Berlin, and also via Christiania, by open text and not in code.
I am not quite clear about the terms of payment and control from the telegram read out to me. If the deadline is on the 26th, it is perhaps still possible to have this checked and clarified, but still we should not in any case let such an opportunity go by. It would be especially important to secure the possibility of using this grain not only to aid the starving, but also for the spring sowing.[1]
I request Molotov and Kamenev to phone me tonight.
21/XII–21
[1] In a telegram on December 19, 1921, L. B. Krasin said that William Brown, a representative of AHA, had conveyed to him the following proposal from Herbert Hoover: the American Government is prepared to spend $20 million to buy grain and seed for the famine-stricken gubernias of Russia, provided the Soviet Government undertook, within three months, beginning from January 1, 1922, to buy $10 million worth of U.S. food and seed for the famine-stricken areas. It stipulated that the purchases were to be made by the Hoover’s Commission (ARA).
The Politbureau of the R.C.P.(B.) C.C. examined this proposal on December 22, 1921, and decided to accept it, instructing M. M. Litvinov to reply to Krasin. That same day, Litvinov urgently cabled Krasin that the proposal had been accepted, and asked “to set the earliest date for the delivery of grain in view of the increasingly acute famine situation” (Central Party Archives of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the C.P.S.U. Central Committee).
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