Written: Written on October 25, 1922
Published:
First published in 1924 in the magazine Khochu Vsyo Znat No. 8.
Printed from a typewritten text with Lenin’s additions and signature.
Source:
Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
1976,
Moscow,
Volume 45,
pages 583b-584a.
Translated: Yuri Sdobnikov
Transcription\Markup:
R. Cymbala
Public Domain:
Lenin Internet Archive
You may freely copy, distribute,
display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and
commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet
Archive” as your source.
• README
Comrade Sosnovsky
I am sending you a copy of Comrade Osinsky’s letter from Berlin dated 14/X, in which he writes about the Shatilov Trust.[2] Please make a study of the work in selecting improved varieties of oats and insert an item in Pravda about the importance of this work, in general, and the work of the Shatilov Trust and the Russian selectionist Lisitsyn, in particular. You will probably be able to obtain all the necessary information from Comrade Teodorovich. Through him, too, you will be able to establish direct contact with the Shatilov people and Lisitsyn. As a preliminary, I recommend that you should acquaint yourself with the book published here in a translation by Timiryazev entitled The New Earth.
V. Ulyanov (Lenin)
Chairman, Council of People’s Commissars
P.S. Earlier I personally heard Osinsky give a very good opinion about the new (or old?) selectionist at the Shatilov Trust. Check this if convenient!
[1] The P.S. is in Lenin’s hand.—Ed.
[2] In a letter to Lenin on October 14, 1922, N. Osinsky objected to the refusal of the interdepartmental conference to include the Shatilov Oats Trust estimates in the budget of the People’s Commissariat for Agriculture on the grounds that it was operating on a profit-and-loss basis. Osinsky recalled that when the Trust was set up the need was recognised to subsidise it for three to five years, and pointed out that refusal of material support for the Trust would entail the loss of already invested resources. He asked Lenin “to exert his personal influence in the sense of fully supplying the Shatilov Trust”. Osinsky also wrote about the selectionist P. I. Lisitsyn, who was in charge of the whole project, and who had abandoned purely academic work in order “to see his oats spread far and wide ...” (see Istorichesky Arkhiv No. 1, 1962, pp. 60–61). See this volume, Document 639.
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