Dear Comrade Razden!
<...> Our South Ossetian comrades are almost all busy with arrangement of refugees, among whom cholera and typhoid were rampant. From these epidemic diseases killed up to 2,000 rebel refugees from South Ossetia. Now the epidemics have subsided, but, nevertheless, over 4,000 refugees still remain in the open air, in tents. <...> The situation of refugees, of course, remains difficult, mainly due to the lack of apartments for them. Of course, all means and methods for their arrangement are exhausted. We hope, one way or another, to cope with this task. There is a great need for manufactories and for soldiers ' sacks of mattresses. The majority of the refugees were stripped by the Georgian troops and expelled for the pass. In the absence of a bed, they have to wallow on bare ground, which, of course, causes massive diseases. If there were soldier mattresses-bags, it would be possible to stuff them with straw and use for bed. The number of refugees is more than 20,000 people. The situation in South Ossetia at the moment is as follows: all the rebel groups were withdrawn by us. Remains in place, in the forests, a small detachment of Gujaret cavalry. They cannot get here, as the Georgian Menshevik military units occupied all the passages and passes. But, nevertheless, we sent people there who would lead them here by some roundabout ways.
Will it succeed? I don’t know. On the ground in South Ossetia, the Georgian Menshevik troops repaired and repair terrible disgraces to this day: they shoot old men and women, all crops are trampled, the villages are burned, the surviving houses are destroyed by the Menshevik marauders, the material from the destroyed houses is taken away with the remaining rebel belongings.
The Congress of the peoples of the East in Baku has recently ended. At this Congress, the Chairman of the mandate Commission, Lado Dumbadze, who issued membership cards to delegates, wrote on the tickets of our delegates that they were "delegated from Georgia", while at the protests of our comrades (Bidzina Kochiev, Ladi Gazzaev, etc.), Lado Dumbadze boldly stated that there is Georgia, but there is no South Ossetia. This statement is not made by a Communist, but by a chauvinist Menshevik who speaks the language of the government of Jordania and Co. <...>
(The struggle of the working people of South Ossetia for Soviet power. 1917-1921: Documents and materials. Stalinir: State Publishing House of South Ossetia, 1957, p. 162-163.)
