Lenin to Ordzonikidze
Vladimir Lenin, Letter to G. K. Ordzhonikidze. March 2, 1921
Original Source: Pravda Gruzii, 6 March 1921, p. 137.
Ordzhonikidze. Baku
Please convey to the Georgian Communists, and particularly to all members of the Georgian Revolutionary Committee, my warm greetings to Soviet Georgia. I especially request them to inform me whether 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, a special policy of concessions with regard to the Georgian intelligentsia and small merchants. It should be realized that it is not only imprudent to nationalize them, but that we must even make certain sacrifices in order to improve their position and enable them to continue their small trade.
Third, it is immensely important to devise an acceptable compromise for a bloc with Jordaniia or similar Georgian Mensheviks, who even prior to the revolt were not absolutely opposed to the idea of Soviet power in Georgia on certain conditions.
Please bear in mind that both the domestic and the international situation of Georgia require that her Communists avoid mechanically copying the Russian pattern. They must skillfully work out their own flexible tactics, based on bigger concessions to the petty-bourgeois elements.
Please reply,
Lenin
Source: V. I. Lenin, The National-Liberation Movement in the East (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1957), pp. 278-79.