Dear comrade writers of *Novaya Zhizn'*! You are dissatisfied with our criticism, calling it angry. Let us try to be gentle and courteous.

Two questions you have posed—we shall take them up to begin with.

Can one seriously speak of control over production, not to mention regulation, without a break with the "inviolability of commercial secrecy"?

We affirmed that *Novaya Zhizn'* does not provide an answer to this "practical" question. *Novaya Zhizn'* objects that we will "find" the answer to this question "even" in *Rabochaya Gazeta*.

We do not find it, dear comrades! And you will never find it. Search more carefully—you will not find it.

*Novaya Zhizn'*, if you will pardon us, sinned precisely in that it declaimed about "control," but did not pose the practical aspect of the practical question concerning the inviolability of commercial secrecy.

The second question: can one confuse the immediate introduction of socialism (against which *Novaya Zhizn'* argued and which we did not propose) with the immediate taking under practical control of banks and syndicates? When we answered this question by pointing out that we do not pretend to expropriate, regulate, or control small-scale enterprise, *Novaya Zhizn'* replied: "a valuable admission," "legitimate," but allegedly made "too hastily."

Forgive us, dear comrades, what "haste" is there here—after all, this is a brief summary of the long and thorough resolution of our conference. Or did you not bother to read this resolution?

It is useful to conduct polemics on the merits. It is harmful to evade such polemics with equivocations.

*Pravda* no. 76, 21 (8) June 1917

Printed from the text of the newspaper *Pravda*