V. I.

Lenin

315

To:   G. Y. SOKOLNIKOV

February 22

Comrade Sokolnikov, The question is not just of GUM alone. All the work of all
our economic bodies suffers most of all from bureaucracy.
Communists have become bureaucrats. If anything will destroy us, it is this. And for the State Bank it is most
dangerous of all to be bureaucratic. We are still thinking in terms
of decrees, of institutions. This is the mistake. The whole
essence now is practical men and practice. To find people who
are men of business (1 out of 100; 1 out of 1,000 Communists,
and that only with God’s help); to transform our decrees
out of dirty paper (it’s all the same whether they arc bad
or good decrees) into living practice—that is the essence .

Whether the State Bank itself should trade, or through subordinate firms, through its agents, or through its client
debtors, etc.—I don’t know. I don’t take it upon myself to
judge, because I am not sufficiently acquainted with the
technique of currency circulation and banking business.
But what I do know firmly is that the whole problem now
is the rapid development of state trade (in all its varieties:
co-operation, clients of the State Bank, mixed companies,
factors, agents, etc., etc.).

February 28

On account of my illness I did not finish and send away
this letter. You speak (in your interview) about replacing
state trusts by mixed companies. There will be no practical
results. The clever capitalists will draw stupid (most honest
and most virtuous) Communists into the mixed companies, and swindle us as they are swindling us now. The problem
now is not one of institutions but of people, and of checking
up on practical experience. One by one we must discover
people who know how to trade, and step by step use their
experience, their labour, to clean out the..., expelling the
virtuous Communists from boards of management, shutting
down sleepy (and strictly communist) enterprises, shutting
them down, separating out the one per cent which are worth
while. Either the People’s Commissariat of Finance will
prove able to got over to such work, or the entire People’s
Commissariat of Finance=0.

Yours, Lenin