Written: Written on September 2, 1921
Published:
First published in part in 1928 in Lenin Miscellany VIII.
Published in full in 1965 in Collected Works, Fifth (Russian) Ed., Vol. 53.
Printed from the original.
Source:
Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
1976,
Moscow,
Volume 45,
pages 278b-280a.
Translated: Yuri Sdobnikov
Transcription\Markup:
R. Cymbala
Public Domain:
Lenin Internet Archive
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• README
Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars
... In fulfilling the duties assigned to the central
and local financial organs, they have recently been
coming up against exceptionally unfavourable
obstacles, chiefly the fact that the executive organs of
the Soviet power have
NB
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completely forgotten the
injunctions of the Constitution on the drawing up of
estimates and the making of expenditures in
accordance with them, which is having an extremely
harmful effect on the general state of the budget, and is
the cause of exceptional upheavals in the system of
monetary circulation.
To illustrate this, one need merely point out the
following circumstances:
1) in some districts, wages
are issued to workers not in accordance with the
tariff rates, but at free market prices, sometimes
amounting to as much as 700,000 rubles per man a day
(Privolzhsk district, and the western and eastern
gubernias);
2) actors and workers of Soviet theatres are
remunerated not according to tariff salaries, but with
additions, coming to many hundreds of per cent over
and above the latter (besides, under the estimates of
the People’s Commissariat for Education the cost of
maintenance of the theatres comes to
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outrageous!!
29,000 million,
and of institutions of higher education, to 17,000
million);
3) it has become commonplace, and very
much the rule for Soviet institutions and enterprises
to purchase the things they need on the free market
and, naturally, at its prices....
A proximate confirmation of the irregularity of
demands for bank-notes from treasure institutions is
provided by the practice,
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How did they
manage
to “adopt”
it without
the P.C.F.?
which has been adopted by
Soviet establishments even in Moscow, under which
the organs of the Moscow Soviet strive to have the
Moscow Finance Department hold for thorn bank-notes
to the amount of 3,000 million rabies a day, i.e.,
75,000 million a month, whereas, according to the
data of the budget department and the Central
Treasury of the People’s Commissariat for Finance, the
Moscow Finance Department has up to now been
granted credits of only 188,000 million rubles, i.e., an
average of not more than 27,000–30,000 million rubles
a month....
Comrade Gorbunov:
Please send the following paper on my behalf: People’s Commissariat for Finance + People’s Commissariat for Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection + Chairman of the Narrow C.P.C.
I authorise the People’s Commissars for Finance and Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection (or their deputies) to call a conference right away with the participation of the Chairman of the Narrow C.P.C., and the C.P.C. Business Manager Gorbunov to work out and put before the C.P.C. within a week draft decisions to combat the afore-mentioned breaches of the law. I draw the attention of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection to this oversight.
How has it been possible to tolerate the outrageous practices described in this paper? In particular, the overrun spending by the People’s Commissariat for Education on the theatres?
Lenin
Chairman, C.P.C.
2/IX.
Comrade Gorbunov:
Please see to it that this is done within a specified period. You may send Smolyaninov instead of yourself, if you want to, or let the conference be a three-sided affair.
2/1X.
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