Bolshevik Leaders correspondence

Bolshevik leadership Correspondence. 1912-1927
Collection of documents 1996.
Compiled by: A.V.Kvashonkin, L.P.Kosheleva, L.A.Rogovaya, O.V.Khlevnyuk.

No. 162

A. M. Nazaretyan - G. K. Ordzhonikidze.

[later 9 August 1922]

Dear Sergo!

1. Answer a number of instructions given to you by the Central Committee (you have looked through all the mail from the Central Committee addressed to you during your departure) 1 .

2. Don't telegraph any more about your arrival. There are circumstances that completely cancel this.

Understandably!?

3. Koba trains me great. I go through a big but boring school. So far, he is working out of me the most perfect clerk and controller over the execution of Polit. Bureau, Org. Bureau and Secretariat. Relationships don't seem bad. He is very cunning. Hard as a nut, you can't crack it right away. But I have a completely different view of him now than the one I had in Tiflis. For all his, so to speak, reasonable savagery of temper, he is a gentle person, has a heart and knows how to appreciate the dignity of people. Ilyich has in him an undoubtedly most reliable Cerberus, who fearlessly guards the gates of the Central Committee of the RCP. Now the work of the Central Committee has changed significantly. What we found here is indescribably bad. And what were our views on the apparatus of the Central Committee in the localities? Now everything has been shaken up. Come back in the fall, you'll see.

4 But still, I'm starting to get bored with this "walking under Stalin" - the latest fashionable expression in Moscow - refers to persons who are at the disposal of the Central Committee and do not yet have appointments, hanging, so to speak, in the air, they say about them like this: walks under Stalin. True, this is only half applicable to me, but still I'm tired of bureaucracy. I hinted to him. Wa, he says, only a month more. After. For now, all the best. Hi all. Your Amayak. Hi Zina. Did Koba's wife receive his letters? See Manya, she's something poor thing that makes everything sick. If he doesn’t go to the dacha, send Legrand to me.

RTSHIDNI; F.85. Op.I/C. D. 13. L. 10. Autograph.

Notes:

1 At the beginning of August, Ordzhonikidze was in Moscow in connection with the plenum of the Central Committee and the XII Conference of the RCP(b). On August 9, he took part in a meeting of the Organizing Bureau of the Central Committee.