ON MEASURES TO COMBAT FAMINE
[Second half of May — early June 1918]
1. To hold surplus grain and other food products when the people in Petrograd, Moscow and dozens of non-agricultural uyezds are not only suffering from a shortage of bread but are painfully starving, is the greatest crime, deserving the most merciless punishment.
2. The task of combating famine is not only to pump out grain from grain-producing areas, but to pour into and collect in state reserves all surplus grain to the last, as well as all food products in general. Without achieving this, it is impossible to ensure absolutely any socialist transformations, nor to ensure the possibility of waging a successful defensive war.
3.*
6i*i
LETTER TO A. A. IOFFE
2/VI. 1918
Comrade Ioffe! Sokolnikov and Bukharin are coming to you, and it seems, Larin too! I take this opportunity to warn you somewhat. I am sitting at a meeting of “departing” people (without Larin). I hear speeches against the idea that “Ioffe is moving the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs to Berlin”.
The friction between you and Chicherin is sometimes used — more unconsciously than consciously — in the sense or in the direction of exacerbating this friction.
I am convinced that you will be on your guard and will not allow these frictions to sharpen. I have followed attentively your letters and am firmly convinced that these frictions are unimportant (chaos everywhere, carelessness everywhere — in all commissariats, and the cure for this evil is slow). Patience and persistence, and the frictions will smooth over. Chicherin is a superb worker, your line very loyally carries out the Brest Treaty, success is already yours, in my opinion — and hence it follows that frictions will be easily settled.
If the German merchants grasp the economic advantages, having understood that they can take nothing from us by war, we will burn everything — then your policy will continue to be successful. To give raw materials to the Germans
* The manuscript ends here.

1917—1918

We can manage. In important cases — send me copies of your precise demands. Set up a direct line as soon as possible.
Bukharin is loyal, but has gone overboard with "left-communism" to the point of insanity.
Sokolnikov has gone off the rails again. Larin — a vacillating intellectual, a first-rate blunderer. Therefore, be extremely on guard with all these most amiable and most splendid delegates. Sokolnikov is a most valuable worker, but sometimes (and precisely now) something "comes over" him and he "smashes the china" because of paradoxes. If you do not take precautions, he will smash a lot of china at your place there.
And Bukharin — three times as much. Prenez garde! *
I hope that Krasin and Ganetsky, as businesslike people, will help you and the whole matter will get sorted out.
Thank you for the "appendix" to your letter. I await more.
Best regards.
Your Lenin
P. S. Among the Russian Bolsheviks taken prisoner by Germany (Zivilgefangene **) was Popov 2 from Brussels, captured in Belgium. Could he be found and taken into service?
P.P.S.
Try to send the enclosure to Switzerland by courier — and not by mail.
1 The persons named by V. I. Lenin (G. Y. Sokolnikov, N. I. Bukharin, and Y. Larin) were being sent to Berlin as part of a Soviet delegation to negotiate an economic agreement with Germany (see also Lenin Miscellany XXI, pp. 246–247).
2 I. F. Popov was a member of the Bolshevik party from 1905 to 1915; he returned to Russia from German captivity in 1918; later a Soviet writer.

REMARKS ON THE DRAFT "REGULATIONS
ON THE MANAGEMENT OF NATIONALIZED
ENTERPRISES" 1
[2 June 1918]
Communism demands and presupposes the greatest centralization of large-scale production throughout the entire country. Therefore, the all-Russian center must unconditionally be given the right to subordinate