V. I.

Lenin

678

To:   M. I. FRUMKIN AND I. I. RADCHENKO [1]

21/III.1922.

Comrades Frumkin and Radchenko:

In a talk with me yesterday, Comrade Krasin expressed the fear that both of you are freetraders, which is why the
future of the foreign-trade monopoly is being predetermined
in a negative sense. I protested most vigorously; I referred
to the fact that both of you are old Party men, tried and
tested in every way, and that there was not the slightest
ground for assuming that an absolutely precise directive
from the C.C. Politbureau (which confirmed the theses recognising the foreign-trade monopoly) could be
unfulfilled by you. In addition, I expressed great doubt about
Comrade Frumkin being a “freetrader”. If Comrade
Radchenko had earlier spoken out (something I, too, had heard
from him) in the sense that the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Trade could “ not cope ” with the monopoly,
what he had in mind, first, was the unsatisfactory apparatus
of the P.C.F.T., which is the very thing we are now going
to improve, and, second, apparently, the “absolute” monopoly of foreign trade, now substituted by a liberal
monopoly, a monopoly unconditionally and in any case.

I consider it my duty to inform you about that talk with
Krasin. Write me a couple of words. I hope that on the basis of “mixed societies”, if we all, you especially, see
to it that there are no “compuppets”, communist puppets,
up there on top for the sake of appearances, while specialists, swindlers, etc., handle all the business—that on this
basis we shall restructure the whole economy of trade and restructure it precisely in the way necessary to ensure
socialist construction.

With communist greetings, Lenin