15. II. 1922

Copy to Comrades Tsyurupa and Kamenev

Comrade Sokolnikov!

Should we not concentrate our main attention on the development of trade and its control through the Trade Department of the State Bank?

Should we not arrange matters so that we find two or three dozen (or even fewer, if our damned bureaucratic machine cannot manage such a “difficult” task) plenipotentiaries of the Trade Department of the State Bank and so that these plenipotentiaries receive bonuses in proportion to the growth of trade turnover in the enterprises or territorial areas “entrusted” to them?

It seems to me that this is more realistic than setting up special commissions or institutions which, given our foul morals (with pretensions to “true communism”), are bound to degenerate into bureaucratic imbecility. Meanwhile, the Trade Department of the State Bank must be given a clear practical task: to develop internal trade and to bring it under its control. And let both the plenipotentiaries and the members of the board (if the Trade Department of the State Bank has board members) receive bonuses for the expansion of operations—*only* for the expansion of operations.

Judging by what Gorbunov told me about the outcome of his “efforts” with regard to the Belov and Gum affair, the fault of the Trade Department of the State Bank here is plain: they missed it; they slept on it; like the bureaucratic scum they really are, they waited for orders from “the higher-ups.” I think that for this the Trade Department should be punished at once and quite severely, with a warning: one more such oversight, one more such display of sleeping sickness—and prison.

Another practical measure, it seems to me, would be: registration of private trade transactions and a tax on them by means of stamp duty or something similar. How does this matter stand? Could not private trade be subordinated (or begin to be subordinated) to the control of the People’s Commissariat of Finance and the State Bank in this way?

I think that the success of the work of the entire People’s Commissariat of Finance should be measured, 99/100, by the development of state trade and of the Trade Department of the State Bank (in respect of credit for private trade). The rest is 1/100.*

With communist greetings,
Lenin