To Milyutin, Rykov, Krestinsky, Bryukhanov.*
[After February 2, 1919]
The question of cooperatives and consumer communes, recently discussed in the Council of People's Commissars (cf.** *Izvestiya* of Feb. 2) 1, places on the agenda, as most important, transitional measures from bourgeois cooperation to communist consumer-producer unification of the entire population.
Let us assume that cooperation unites 98% of the population? This happens in the villages.
Does this cooperation already become a commune?
No, if this cooperation (1) gives benefits (dividends on shares, etc.) to a group of special shareholders; (2) retains its special apparatus, not drawing into it the population in general, the proletariat and semi-proletarians first and foremost; (3) in the distribution of products, does not give benefits to semi-proletarians over middle peasants, to middle peasants over the rich; (4) in extracting products, does not confiscate surpluses first from the rich, then from the middle peasants, not relying in this on the proletarians and semi-proletarians. And so on and so forth.

The whole difficulty of the task (and the whole content of the present task, immediately facing us) consists in working out a system of practical measures for the transition from the old cooperation (necessarily bourgeois, insofar as a layer of shareholders is singled out, constituting a minority of the population, as well as for other reasons) to a new and to a real commune,— measures for the transition from bourgeois-cooperative to proletarian-communist supply and distribution.
It is necessary (1) to put this question in the press;

* The entire text was written by Lenin in black ink. The surnames and the note "to the archive" are written in pencil. On one of the copies, typed on a typewriter in the name of V. P. Milyutin, Lenin added "and Rykov" in pencil by hand. Ed.