To the Revolutionary Military Council of the U.S.S.R. Greetings to the men, commanders and political personnel of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army! Created under the leadership of Lenin, the Red Army covered itself with undying glory in the great battles of the Civil War, in which it drove out the interventionists from the U.S.S.R. and upheld the cause of socialism in our country.

The Red Army is today a bulwark of peace and the peaceful labour of the workers and peasants, the vigilant guardian of the frontiers of the Soviet Union. The workers of our country, who have victoriously completed the five-year plan in four years, are equipping the Red Army with new instruments of defence. Your job, comrades, is to learn to handle those instruments to perfection and to do your duty to your country, should our enemies try to attack it.

Hold high the banner of Lenin, the banner of struggle for communism! Long live the heroic Red Army, its leaders, its Revolutionary Military Council!

J. Stalin

Pravda, No. 53,

February 23, 1933

REPLY TO A LETTER FROM Mr. BARNES

March 20, 1933

Dear Mr. Barnes,

Your fears as to the safety of American citizens in the U.S.S.R. are quite groundless.

The U.S.S.R. is one of the few countries in the world where a display of national hatred or an unfriendly attitude towards foreigners as such is punishable by law. There has never been, nor could there be, a case of any one becoming an object of persecution in the U.S.S.R. on account of his national origin. That is particularly true with regard to foreign specialists in the U.S.S.R., including American specialists, whose work in my opinion deserves our thanks. As for the few British employees of Metro-Vickers,67 legal action was taken against them not as Britishers but as persons who, our investigating authorities assert, have violated laws of the U.S.S.R. Was not legal action taken similarly against Russians? I do not know what bearing this case can have on American citizens. Ready to be of service to you,

J. Stalin

Published for the first time