AND INSTRUCTIONS TO N. P. GORBUNOV

To the Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars

... In the course of implementing the obligations entrusted to the central and local financial organs, we have recently been encountering exceptionally unfavorable obstacles, and chiefly the fact of complete disregard on the part of the executive organs of Soviet power for the Constitution's instructions concerning the compilation of budgets and the conducting of expenditures in accordance with them, which is having an extremely harmful effect on the general state of the budget and introducing exceptional disruptions into the system of monetary circulation.

By way of illustration, it will suffice to mention the following circumstances here: 1) in certain districts, workers are paid not according to tariff rates, but at free market prices, and this sometimes amounts to 700,000 rubles per person per day (Volga region, western and eastern provinces); 2) artists and workers in Soviet theaters are compensated not according to tariff scales, but with additions amounting to many hundreds of percent of the latter (moreover, according to the budget of the People's Commissariat of Enlightenment, the expenditure for the maintenance of

NB

Outrageous!!

theaters is calculated at 29 billion, and for higher educational institutions at 17 billion; 3) the purchases by Soviet institutions and enterprises of required items on the free market and, of course, at the prices of the latter have become a common, as it were, established practice...

How did they "master" it without the NCF?

The immediate confirmation of the unsystematic character of demands from cash institutions for monetary notes can be found in the practice adopted even in Moscow by Soviet institutions, according to which the organs of the Moscow Soviet strive for the Moscow financial department to have at their disposal monetary notes amounting to 3 billion rubles per day, that is, 75 billion per month, whereas according to the data of the budget department and the Central Cash Office of the NCF, credits opened for the Moscow financial department total only 188 billion rubles to date, that is, on average no more than 27-30 billion rubles per month...

Comrade Gorbunov! Send such a paper from me: NCF + NKRI + to the Chairman of the Smaller SNK.

I charge the People's Commissars of Finance and Rabkrin (or their deputies) to immediately convene a conference with the participation of the chairman of the Moscow SNK and the manager of affairs of the SNK, Gorbunov, for the development and submission within a week to the SNK of draft decrees for combating the violations of law indicated here. I direct the attention of Rabkrin to this oversight.

How was it possible to tolerate these outrages up to now? In particular, at the People's Commissariat of Enlightenment's overspending on theaters?

Chairman of the SNK Lenin

2/IX.

Comrade Gorbunov! Monitor the implementation of this deadline carefully. If you wish, replace yourself with Smolyanirov or leave the conference to three persons.

Lenin

2/IX.

Published for the first time from the manuscript

Written September 2, 1921

First published in incomplete form in 1928 in Lenin Miscellany VIII

Published here in full