Solving the Transport Problem
Vladimir Lenin, Letter to Comrade Trotsky. February 1, 1920
Written from the Kremlin on February 1, 1920, Lenin’s brief memo to Trotsky portrays rail transport as “catastrophic” and demands short-term emergency measures to keep grain moving. The document is reproduced here because it shows the “storming” style of crisis management the Bolshevik leadership increasingly relied on: ration incentives, mass reassignment of party cadres to transport work, and even the imposition of military law along railway lines.
Chairman of the Council of Workers' and Peasants' Defense of the RSFSR
Copy of Copy
Moscow, Kremlin
1.2.1920
No. a-1610
To: Moscow-Comrade Trotsky.
The situation with regard to railroad transport is quite catastrophic. Grain supplies no longer get through. Genuine emergency measures are required to save the position. For a period of two months (February-March) measures of the following kind must be put into force (as well as devising other measures too of a comparable kind):
I. The individual bread ration is to be reduced for those not engaged on transport Work; and increased for those engaged on it.
Even if thousands more perish, the country will be saved.
II. Three quarters of the senior Party workers from all departments, except the Commissariats of Supply and of Military Affairs, are to be drafted to railroad transport and maintenance work for these two months. The work of the other Commissariats is correspondingly to stop (or to be cut down tenfold) for these two months.
III. Within a 30-50 verst wide zone along each side of the railroad lines military law is to be introduced for the purpose of conscripting labor for clearing the tracks; and three quarters of the senior Party workers from the volost' and uyezd executive committees of the corresponding regions are to be transferred to the volosts in this area.
Chairman of the Council of Defense
V. Ul'ianov (Lenin)
Source: Leon Trotsky, The Trotsky Papers, 1917-1922 (The Hague: Mouton, 1975), Vol. II, p. 23.