675. To G. K. ORJONIKIDZE

Written in August, prior to 27, 1920 · First published in 1942 in Lenin Miscellany XXXIV. Printed from the original. · page 423

Comrade Sergo,

I am sending you reports delivered to me. Return them, please, with your remarks about the facts: what is true, what is untrue.^[1]

I daresay you get into a bad temper, on occasion, don’t you?

You ought to get some assistants, perhaps, and direct the work more systematically.

I hope you will not take offence at my remarks and will reply frankly what you think you can straighten out and correct, and how.

Greetings,
Yours,
Lenin

Notes

[1] On August 27, 1920, Orjonikidze received Lenin’s letter, to which were appended extracts from a letter by A. S. Serafimovich, who in the summer of 1920 was in the Caucasus. Being misinformed about the political work of Party and administrative functionaries in the Caucasus, Serafimovich in his letter adduced a number of alleged facts casting a slur on the revolutionary activity of Orjonikidze, a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Caucasian Front. In returning these extracts to Lenin, Orjonikidze refuted all the accusations against him as being false and groundless.

On receiving this reply, Lenin wrote: “I think Sergo (= Orjonikidze) is incapable of lying.” (Collected Works, Fifth Ed., Vol. 51, p. 450.)