WHAT TO DO WITH RABKRIN?

Undoubtedly, Rabkrin presents an enormous difficulty for us. So far nothing has come of it, and the question of its organisation and even of its expediency in general remains a question.

I think that those who doubt its necessity are wrong. But at the same time I do not deny that the question of our state apparatus and its improvement is very difficult and far from solved.

Our state apparatus, with the exception of Narkomindel, is to the greatest extent a relic of the old, one that has been subjected to the least degree of fundamental break-up. It has only been slightly dusted off from above. And in all other respects, in order to set it going properly, what was always required, and is required now, by the workers’ and peasants’ state, a state moreover built on entirely new principles, is the concentration within it, within the very hierarchical framework, of Party members.

It is enough to recall how we acted in dangerous moments of the civil war, how we concentrated our best Party forces in the Red Army, how we resorted to the mobilisation of advanced Party workers — to confirm what has been said.

And so, it seems to me that the conclusion to be drawn from all our attempts to reorganise the Workers and Peasants Inspection is that we have not yet made one more attempt. Namely, we have not tried to entrust this matter to our workers and peasants, placing them at the head of our Party, as members of the Central Committee.

I envisage this transformation of Rabkrin as follows: several dozen (from 50 to 75) workers and peasants, fully tested in respect of conscientiousness and devotion, are elected to the Party Central Committee in addition to the other members of the Central Committee. At the same time Rabkrin is at last (at last!) reduced to a few hundred persons, on the one hand those most tested in the affairs of Rabkrin in general, i.e. those most familiar with the general supervision of our apparatus, highly qualified specialists both in knowledge of our apparatus and in theoretical preparation in questions of the organisation of labour in institutions, and in methods of inspection and investigation; and on the other hand, persons of a purely secretarial, auxiliary apparatus.

The new members of the Central Committee, who are fully equal in rights with the other members of the Central Committee, are given the assignment: by protracted and persistent work to study and improve our state apparatus. All the other employees of Rabkrin are given the assignment to assist them in this: some as those most familiar with this apparatus and most familiar with the work of Rabkrin, others as employees of the secretarial type.

The People’s Commissariat of the Workers and Peasants Inspection could remain the same commissariat as before. The new members of the Central Committee* could be considered as being on temporary assignment to it. The People’s Commissar of the Workers and Peasants Inspection could keep his title, his position and his rights, as could the members of his collegium.

What advantages would we derive from such an organisation? First of all, we would once and for all give up new reorganisations undertaken on the basis of insufficient study of our apparatus. Secondly, we would immediately raise the authority of this commissariat both by drawing members of the Central Committee into it and by reducing the number of its employees to a few hundred. For from the present state of affairs, when the members of the People’s Commissariat of the Workers and Peasants Inspection as a general rule live on handouts from the institutions being inspected, we would pass at once to a situation in which the maximum independence of the Rabkrin employees would be guaranteed either by very high salaries (this can be achieved by reducing the number of employees to a few hundred exclusively highly qualified and tested senior employees) or by those assistants of a purely secretarial type who would be under the constant control and supervision both of the above-mentioned members of the Central Committee and of the few specialists retained by us after careful verification of the number of employees in the commissariat.

The new members of the Central Committee would receive the assignment to study our state apparatus more attentively and carefully in all its ramifications, including the state trusts. This business cannot be done quickly. Therefore they would receive no definite time limit for their assignment. On the other hand, they could count on several years of work, with one group of Central Committee members replaced by another for the same assignment, i.e. by a decision of a party congress we would guarantee the members of the Central Committee in this post the possibility of working for several years and then returning to their previous place.

9 January 1923  
Lenin  
Recorded by M. V.*

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WHAT TO DO WITH RABKRIN?  
(continuation)

I foresee that precisely this plan will give rise to a whole heap of objections, the majority of which will be prompted by the malicious howl of the worst of the old elements of our state apparatus, those who have remained truly old, i.e. pre-revolutionary. They will say that this will create total chaos in the work, that the members of the Central Committee, not knowing what to do, will wander around the people’s commissariats, around institutions, everywhere hindering work, demanding explanations, and so on and so forth.

It seems to me that the nature of such objections reveals their source all too clearly and that it is hardly even worth answering them. It goes without saying that if we were to presuppose a composition of employees of the usual type, then perhaps some of these objections might be justified. But the point is that we do not presuppose a composition of employees of the usual type in this commissariat; we take exclusively a composition of the best workers, who, upon verification by a party congress, deserve election to the Central Committee. In this way, it seems to me, we guarantee that the composition of the People’s Commissariat of the RKI will in future be no worse in quality than the best of our commissariats, namely Narkomindel. What explains the fact that Narkomindel has the best composition of employees? The fact that there, in the first place, diplomats of the old stamp could not remain in any appreciable proportion; secondly, because we selected comrades there anew, selecting them exclusively according to new criteria, according to their suitability for new tasks; thirdly, because in Narkomindel there is none of that abundance of employees picked up from here and there who, in essence, completely reproduce the old qualities of officials, as in other commissariats; and, fourthly, because Narkomindel works under the direct leadership of our Central Committee. This is, properly speaking, the only one of our commissariats that has been fully renewed by us, that works genuinely for the workers’ and peasants’ power and in its spirit, and not merely considered to be working that way, while in fact working, in the main, against it or not in its spirit.

* M. A. Volodicheva.

Now, what conditions emerge before us in order to obtain from the RKI a similarly genuinely renewed apparatus? The first condition — conscientiousness will be fully ensured by election; the second condition — the high qualities of the workers in terms of their devotion to the cause and their ability; the third condition — their proximity to the highest Party institution and their equality of rights with those who lead our Party, and through it our entire state apparatus.

They may say that no conscientiousness, no Party authority can replace what is fundamental in this case, namely: knowledge of the matter, knowledge of our state apparatus and knowledge of how it is to be remade.

To this I will answer that in my proposal one of the most essential conditions is that we do not expect quick results from the work of the new commissariat and we assume in advance that this work will stretch out over many years. Then the question reduces to the organisation of the work of the new commissariat.

And here I consider myself entitled to assume that both our Party workers and the leaders of our present RKI have gathered enough experience, enough knowledge, enough skill and other qualities to properly organise the training of the new members of the Central Committee, and moreover training in practice, i.e. to combine their familiarisation with all the details of our state apparatus with their familiarisation also in the area of what modern science of the bourgeois state has done in the matter of establishing the best possible work of employees of all kinds.

13 January 1923  
Lenin  
Recorded by L. F.*

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WHAT TO DO WITH RABKRIN?  
(continuation 2)

I assume, as a matter of course, that the RKI will now begin, on the basis of five years’ experience, to organise the work along new lines; will divide the new workers into a number of groups, distributing the work among these groups systematically; will divide these groups into those periodically engaged in work involving practical familiarisation with experience abroad, and those theoretically engaged in work involving familiarisation with the findings of modern science in the area of the organisation of labour in general, and especially managerial labour. It will have all the workers of the RKI go through the tasks assigned to them systematically from bottom to top, in various functions and in various branches of administration, in various localities, in various conditions of work in respect of nationalities, and so on.

In a word, I assume that the comrades in the RKI have learned something during these five years and that they will be able to apply to the new organisation of the commissariat the knowledge they have acquired. Besides, it must not be forgotten that we have, I believe, three institutions of a scientific nature devoting themselves to the study of the organisation of labour (the Central Institute of Labour, a group within the RKI set aside for this purpose, and a group in the War Commissariat). A congress of all these three groups was held recently, and it is to be hoped that their work will now proceed more correctly, more amicably and more purposively than hitherto.

What new organisation of work do I envisage on the part of the Secretariat of our Central Committee? Of course, several dozen members of the Central Committee will require a new organisation of work. But I must note that we have already in fact shifted to organising the plenum of our Central Committee along the lines of supreme conferences. The task now is to organise the training of these new members of the Central Committee in all the work of the Central Committee and in the work of familiarising themselves with the supreme state institutions. If we delay this matter, we will not be carrying out one of our fundamental duties, namely, the duty of using our tenure of power to teach the best elements of the toiling masses all the details of administration. Measures such as greater ordering of the sittings of our Politburo, scheduling them twice a week with shorter sitting hours, better preparation of all documents for them and the earlier provision of these documents to all members of the Central Committee — such measures already flow from the whole course of the work and are urgently required, so that it is scarcely possible to imagine any objections to them. Of course, this will require an increase in expenditure on employees of the secretarial type, but to grudge money on this expenditure would be a most unreasonable thing.

Furthermore, I shall not conceal from the comrades that I consider an important plus of increasing the number of members of the Central Committee to be the reduction of the personal, accidental element in its decisions, the greater preparation of these decisions, the more thorough verification of all the assertions made at such sittings, and in connection with this the greater stability of our Central Committee both in terms of the continuity of its work and in terms of its resistance to splits, which might be provoked given insufficient ties of this institution with the masses.

Lenin  
13 January 1923