Written:2 March,
1921
First Published: Pravda Gruzzil No. 5;
March 6, 1921; Published according to the manuscript
Source: Lenin’s Collected Works, 1st English
Edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1965, Volume 32, page 160
Translated: Yuri Sdobnikov
Transcription\HTML Markup: David
Walters & R.
Cymbala
Copyleft: V. I. Lenin Internet Archive
(www.marx.org) 2002. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this
document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation
License
March 2, 1921
Serge Orjonikidze
Please convey to the Georgian Communists, and in par-ticular to all members of the Georgian Revolutionary Com-mittee, my warm greetings to Soviet Georgia. My special request to them is to inform me whether or not we are in complete agreement on the following three questions:
First, immediate arming of the workers and poor peasants and formation of a strong Georgian Red Army.
Second, there is need for a special policy of concessions with regard to the Georgian intelligentsia and small mer-chants. It should be realised that it is not only imprudent to nationalise them, but that there is even need for certain sacrifices in order to improve their position and enable them to continue their small trade.
Third, it is of tremendous importance to devise an acceptable compromise for a bloc with Jordania or similar Georgian Mensheviks, who before the uprising had not been absolutely opposed to the idea of Soviet power in Georgia on certain Terms.
Please bear in mind that Georgia’s domestic and interna-tional positions both require that her Communists should avoid any mechanical copying of the Russian pattern. They must skilfully work out their own flexible tactics, based on bigger concessions to all the petty-bourgeois elements.
Please reply,
Lenin