Dictated: Dictated over the telephone May 20, 1922
Published:
First published in 1959 in Lenin Miscellany XXXVI.
Printed from the’ secretary’s notes (typewritten copy).
Source:
Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
1971,
Moscow,
Volume 42,
page 420a.
Translated: Bernard Isaacs
Transcription\Markup:
R. Cymbala
Public Domain:
Lenin Internet Archive
(2004).
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I think it should be put on the agenda and a reduction by one-fourth announced, the reason given being that a real, if only small and not very reliable, step towards a truce has been made at Genoa.
Lenin
[1] Lenin’s letter was a reply to the inquiry of the Secretariat of the C.C., R.C.P., asking whether or not the question of reducing the size of the Red Army should be raised at the Third Session of the All-Russia C.E.C. of the Ninth Convocation. A plan for reducing the size of the Red Army was being drafted by the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic in connection with the question of a possible general reduction in armaments which had been raised by the Soviet delegation at the Genoa Conference. This question was included in the agenda of the Third Session in a tentative form, depending on the results of the Genoa Conference. On May 24, 1922, the All-Russia C.E.C. passed a resolution which stated: “Thanks to the line pursued by our delegation, the Genoa Conference gives ground for hoping that a serious reduction of the army is possible.” The resolution went on to say: “The Genoa Conference, however, has provided no solution to the most pressing problems concerning the relations between the Soviet Republic and the bourgeois states, leaving fundamental issues to be dealt with at the Hague.... In view of this the question of reducing the army was removed from the agenda of the Third Session. The session asked the Government and the People’s Commissariat for Military Affairs to table a pertinent motion when the results of the Hague Conference had been ascertained (see Third Session of the All-Russia Central Executive Committee of the Ninth Convocation. Bulletin No. 10 (Russ. ed.), May 26, 1922, pp. 18–19).
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