LENIN’S NOTE ON THE ORGANIZATION PROJECT
COMMISSARIAT OF SUPPLIES.
A circular should be issued by the Commissariat of Food—
or, perhaps even better, a decree from the SNK—detailing, with the utmost clarity:
— that delegate committees must be permitted to work in concert with, and under the guidance of, the provincial food commissions;
— that the separate existence and independent operations of delegate committees are unacceptable; such a practice invariably leads to the infiltration of speculators;
— that the assistance of delegate committees—and their active participation in agitation against kulaks and speculators—is especially desirable, conducted under the leadership of the agitational detachments of the provincial food commissions, and so forth.
All of this must be expounded in painstakingly detailed yet highly accessible terms, and then put to print.
1. In the minutes of the SNK meeting held on May 20, A. Tsyurupa proposed placing on the agenda a draft decree on the reorganization of local food authorities and on the transformation of the Commissariat of Food into the Commissariat of Supplies, with the SNK deciding to postpone discussion of the matter until May 22, 1918.
2. Lenin’s proposal was formulated in §3 of the second section of the decree on local authorities as follows:
At local food authorities, at the discretion of the People’s Commissar of Food, special detachments shall be established, composed of conscious, recommended party members who adhere to the Soviet platform, and of workers organized within professional and Soviet bodies—formed, above all, in consumer regions.
These detachments are placed at the disposal of local food authorities and, in their activities, are subject to the directives of those authorities.
Local food authorities make use of these detachments for organizational, instructional, and agitational purposes.
The primary task of the worker detachments must be to organize the laboring peasantry against the kulaks.
The activities of these detachments are governed by a special instruction approved by the People’s Commissar of Food” (see the Appendices to Vol. XXIII of the Collected Works, p. 529).
3. We are referring to an addendum, written on five pages (1–5) to the telegram “On Enrollment in Food Detachments” (see Petrogradskaya Pravda, No. 103, May 22, 1918), which, under the title “Draft Telegram to Petrograd Workers, May 21, 1918,” was published in the Collected Works, Vol. XXIII, p. 25.

The document now being printed appears to be a draft resolution of the SNK, penned by L. D. Tsyurupa in connection with Lenin’s proposal to clarify the relationship between delegate committees and provincial food commissions (see p. 94). This resolution is not recorded in the minutes of the SNK; it is possible that it was never actually submitted.