Financial Centralization
Финансовая централизация
Date: 1918
Source: PSS vol 36
Translated by: AI (Claude)

We need financial centralization, we need concentration of our forces; without implementing these principles in life we will not achieve economic transformations under which every citizen will have a piece of bread and the possibility of satisfying their cultural needs.

At the present moment the necessity of centralization is already penetrating into the consciousness of the popular masses; if this turn is proceeding slowly, it will be deeper and wider for that; if tendencies toward decentralization are observed – this is an illness of the transitional period, a growing pain; it is completely natural, since tsarist and bourgeois centralism instilled hatred and revulsion in the popular masses toward any central authority.

I regard centralism as the minimum of a certain guarantee for the working masses. I am for the broadest autonomy of local soviet organizations, but at the same time I think that for the fruitfulness of our work in the conscious transformation of the country, a unified, strictly defined financial policy and execution of directives from top to bottom is necessary.

We await from you a decree on the financial centralization of the country.