Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

620

To: N. P. GORBUNOV

Dictated: Dictated by phone on February 6, 1922
Published: First published in 1945 in Lenin Miscellany XXXV. Printed from a typewritten copy.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1976, Moscow, Volume 45, page 461^b.
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.

Will you check up on the basis of which laws and rules over 143 private publishers are registered in Moscow, as Izvestia of 5/II reports, what are the administrative and editorial staffs responsible for each publisher, what is their civil liability and also responsibility in law generally, who is in charge of this business at the State Publishers, who is responsible for it.

Also have a secret talk about how and what kind of supervision of this business is organised on the part of the People’s Commissariat for Justice, the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection and the All-Russia Cheka. All this is strictly confidential. Get a reply ready for me, even if only a preliminary one, by Wednesday.^[1]

Lenin

Notes

[1] On February 7, 1922, N. L. Meshcheryakov, chairman of the edi- torial board and head of Gosizdat’s political department, informed Lenin that “private publishers were operating under the decree of December 12, 1921”; to supervise their activity a political department had been set up under Gosizdat; there were political departments in Moscow and Petrograd. Meshcheryakov also sent in copies of circulars on organising local political de- partments. These circulars said that publishers were to submit manuscripts to the political departments for examination; print- ing shops were not entitled to publish any book “unless the manu- script had been passed by the political department” (Central Party Archives of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the C.P.S.U. Central Committee).