Amend the instruction issued by the People’s Commissariat for Land Affairs[31] and, through all organs of Soviet power, ensure the effective implementation of oversight in accordance with the following principles:

1) Strictly prohibit landlords or estate managers from holding positions in state farms located within the same county or neighboring counties where they previously served under landlord rule.

2) Maintain meticulous records of estate managers and farm employees, subjecting them to scrutiny no less rigorous than that applied to military specialists, with particular regard to their potential counterrevolutionary tendencies.

3) Increase the number of representatives from provincial and regional land departments stationed at state farms, while strengthening the oversight exercised by these departments over the farms themselves.

4) Urge the Professors’ Council to devote greater attention and resources to workers’ committees and their activities.

5) Prohibit sharecropping and similar arrangements in state farms.

6) Immediately bring all state farm leaderships to trial in cases where they fail to substantiate, through concrete evidence, their compliance with Article 59 of the Regulations on Socialist Land Management—namely, their failure to provide genuine assistance to the local peasantry.

7) Develop mechanisms for state farms and workers’ committees to render regular reports to the local peasant population and to keep the latter fully informed.

8) Require the Council of People’s Commissars to receive monthly, fact-based reports from the People’s Commissariat for Land Affairs and from workers’ committees, supplemented by one or two key provincial land departments, detailing the implementation of these directives.

9) Task the Central Statistical Administration with expanding its existing monographic surveys of state farms to encompass the specific issues necessary for verifying the fulfillment of the aforementioned provisions.

10) Reconsider the allocation of land to state farms, paying particular attention to instances where farms possess excessively large tracts of land or where non-proletarian organizations have seized control of significant portions of agricultural holdings.

11) Make it a general practice for provincial and district land departments to nominate candidates for state farm leadership positions.

12) Submit the instruction and accompanying measures to the Council of People’s Commissars, first having them reviewed by the commission[32] comprising Sereda, Sapronov, Vladimirs­ky, Tsiurupa, Milyutin, and Golubev[33].

Written in August, no later than the 5th, 1919.

First published in 1933 in Volume XXIV of the Lenin Collection.

Printed from the manuscript.