Telegram to V.I. Lenin and L.D. Trotsky, June 22, 1918

Source: Tom 17

June 22, 1918. Comrade Lenin! Comrade Trotsky!

I write briefly: I have little time; I am busy to an outrageous degree.

1) The food supply situation is improving, and if you send more colored textiles and money in small denominations (no larger than 500-ruble notes), things will go better.

2) Matters are far worse with the war on the external front, and especially on the internal one. The military specialists are lifeless, desk-bound people, utterly unsuited to civil war. Meanwhile, the Cossacks are not idle, and at any moment they may link up with the Orenburg Cossacks, cutting the center off from the grain-producing south. I did not want to take on any military functions, but the district staff itself draws me into its affairs, and I feel that it is impossible to do otherwise, simply impossible. Now I see that it would be useful for the cause if I had direct formal authority to dismiss and appoint, for example, commissars attached to detachments, "staffs," and so forth, to attend sessions of the district staff as a matter of obligation, and in general to represent the central military authority in the south.

Judge for yourselves: the other day the specialist Kovalevsky was arrested by some "commissar," and Snegirev, during his trip to the front, barely escaped arrest. Or again: Zedin is an honest and devoted man as a military commissar, but another military commissar is an incorrigible drunkard who outrageously squanders public funds. And so on and so forth. All such defects need to be corrected immediately, but who is "supposed" to do this? The center cannot sort all this out at once, and there is no authorized representative of the center (military) here. Do you know that Petrov and his entire staff have for some reason departed for Moscow, and that his "army," as a result, has completely disintegrated, opening the road to the Cossacks? Do you know that the mobilization of the Cossacks we announced has played a cruel joke on us, arming several thousand Cossacks who took artillery and other equipment from the staff, then went over to the other side and are now battering our detachments with our own shells? Do you know that detachments of the so-called Don Republic (among which, by the way, only 2-3% are actually Cossacks) tried to seize the Tsaritsyn artillery and then blow up the local Soviet? These are all questions that can only be resolved on the spot.

3) On the Rostov front, negotiations with the Germans are opening.

4) I receive your coded telegrams, but you do not provide the cipher key. Surely you must understand that this makes no sense at all.

5) Why are you not keeping me informed about affairs?

22.VI

Stalin.

Source: Bolshevik Leadership. Correspondence. 1912-1927, pp. 40-41.

RGASPI. F. 558. Op. 1. D. 5404. L. 3.