Comrades. I have one extremely cursed trade, which is that I preside over the Sovnarkom, and I have to suffer at almost every meeting of the Sovnarkom from a disgusting departmental brawl. The Narkomprod roosters on the Narkomputi and accuses it of all sins. The scenes are such that after repeated trials I say that I shall drown myself sometime after one of our meetings. When they say that it is possible to replace the Supreme Council of the People's Economy with departmental bodies, it is nonsense and nonsense: people come and say such departmental nonsense that it is a shame to waste time on it. The good thing about Mr. Trotsky is that he did not do this, that he ended his theses with the wish that - start interdepartmental commissions, which we did. In his theses he proposes that the Central Committee be given the task of creating interdepartmental commissions2. Do not say, you departmentalists and bureaucrats, that we, the VSNKh, are no worse than the Military Department. This is a good way of plucking cheap cotton, only it concludes the interests of purely childish and disgusting, silly business of bickering: who is better - the All-Union People's Commissariat of the National Economy or the People's Commissariat of the People's Commissariat. They are all worthless. Who raised this disgusting departmental brawl? Not Trotsky - there is nothing in his theses. The polemic was raised by Comrades Lomov, Rykov and Larin: each of them has the highest rank - member of the Presidium of the All-Union People's Commissariat of National Economy. They have the Chairman of the All-Union People's Commissariat of the National Economy, and, besides, there are so many officials that if I wanted to list them all, I would lose five minutes of my ten-minute speech. It is therefore said in vain that there seems to be courtesy and cordiality here, an undoubted interest in this meeting. The interest was shown not because of the speeches made by T r. Rykov and others who spoke with a disgusting literary brawl. Trotsky raised the question of new tasks, and they presented a departmental polemic with the 7th Congress of Soviets3. What do we not know that Lomov, Rykov and Larin in their stupidest article did not say this directly. Here some orator said: one cannot polemize with the 7th Congress of Soviets, one must have courage and head to polemize with the 7th Congress of Soviets openly. Did the 7th Congress make a mistake? Speak directly, correct it at the meeting that it is a mistake, and not talk about centralization and decentralization. Tov. Rykov says that it is necessary to talk about centralization and decentralization, because Tov. Trotsky did not notice it. One assumes that here sit people so backward that they have forgotten the first lines of those theses of Trotsky which say: "The economic economy presupposes a general plan..." etc. Do you know how to read Russian, kindest t. Rykov, Larin and Lomov[?]. Go back to when you were 16 years old and start babbling about centralization and decentralization4. This is a state task for the members of the Collegium, the Presidium of the All-Union People's Commissariat of National Economy. This is such a feisty and pathetic garbage that it is shameful and disgraceful to waste time on it. The dispute begins when we say what the new tasks are: the question was about collegiality and unanimity. As for collegiality and unity of command, it is very cheap if we say in the workers' assembly: we are for collegiality, and to carry out bourgeois principles. I heard this polemic in the Sovnarkom. It is such nonsense that it can only be said in a departmental brawl. Collegiality turns into the chatter of people who sit in an assembly and talk about how one-man rule is the only decent way of organizing. Of course we do, and we need workers to learn how to manage. Of course they can learn in the board, if they don't know how to do otherwise, then let them stay in the boards. You don't need a collegium to learn: take helpers. We will combine the principle of collegiality only in order that the workers learn to manage themselves, and the principle of one-man rule. The collegium should be of four or five comrades, and he should have an assistant. We will use sometimes collegiality, sometimes unanimity. We will leave collegiality for those who are weaker, worse, for the backward, for the undeveloped: let them dabble, get bored, and they will not speak. The war gave us the ability to bring discipline to the maximum and centralize tens and hundreds of thousands of people, comrades, who were dying to save the Soviet Republic. Without it, we'd all go to hell. Yudenich will come by spring, the Entente is preparing, preparing, preparing, and we do not know what it will produce.

I turn to the question of demobilization and the use of military forces in order to be able to adapt these military forces and military apparatus for the time when we are on the eve of the pass. No war has ever ended in such a way that you go home and everyone is happy. Demobilization - let all the workers disperse, 3-pound rations get a 3-pound ration, etc. Of course the assembly, which knows what agony the workers are going through, how starved they are, claps. But you are picking up these cheap claps. We all know very well that desperate hunger, you don't bring that bread up. Think what it means: demobilization. Those who say that are nothing, just talk. Try to demobilize the 3rd Army5, which did an excellent job of putting forward its project. Those who laugh, they understand nothing of the present situation and are incapable of thinking. However erroneous these projects may be - we will parse them in 10 minutes, but basically we will decide as in the telegram of Vol. Trotsky had it printed. Your main point deserves full attention. The army is in the Urals, on the border of Western Siberia: what should it do? Return to Petrograd? It won't go back, the steam locomotives don't run. Another army is marching to the South. Collect tens of millions [poods] of bread. You know that 300 million [million] poods of bread must be gathered, and not talk about economic construction. Try to collect these 300 million poods. The army has marched through Western Siberia, stands there and cannot leave. The army went south of Rostov, it can't leave because the Donetsk region is there, and we can't take troops from there. The army enters the Tauride province, takes Melitopol, where there is a surplus of bread - it cannot leave, because there are counter-revolutionary gangs there, and the bread is lying there. Nobody thinks about this, about specific tasks. Instead of being childish, think about what you can do. The people are starving, the railroads do not carry, and we have an army in which every soldier says: I now know what discipline is. There, skinners were persecuted and shot. This army, too, has defects, for there is no less stupidity in the army apparatus than in the All-Union People's Commissariat of National Economy and the People's Commissariat, etc., and never about this will T. Trotsky write. Trotsky will never write about it. But now it is an apparatus in which there is the possibility of coercion and discipline, and we say: gather this bread and give it a lift, for that is the whole disease. To collect 300 millions you need an apparatus. Where is it, the apparatus: where a hungry man would help a well-fed man to take: we came to the provinces well-fed. Is it shameful to speak of Arakcheevshchina - it is an argument of cheap liberalism, it is the cheapest demagogy - to call the socialist army, which developed enthusiasm as never before, which gave the workers of St. Petersburg and Moscow to hunger sacrifice, to call its discipline and organization Arakcheevshchina? What have we come to? This is the brawl started in the Sovnarkom: take a club and strike. I have the misfortune to see this in every meeting of the Sovnarkom. This is not Arakcheevshchina, but that with which we are in error, and without which we will not win. If we defeated Denikin and Kolchak by the fact that discipline was superior to all the capitalist countries of the world, and Trotsky introduced the death penalty, we will approve. He introduced it by conscious organization and agitation of the Communists. We put down tens of thousands of the best Communists for ten thousand White Guard officers, and by this we saved the country. These methods must now be applied. You won't get bread without it. There's plenty of bread only in Ukraine. We can't bring bread, to put the workers on bread rations, we need to collect extra. In order to do construction, we need to send millions of workers to work. They say: well, let the workers from the army come home. No one will go, because everyone knows that there is hunger here. They will stay in the well-fed places, in Melitopol province, etc., with their armies, which eat three times as much, but if the army did not eat, it would not save you. You have to think not of the department of the All-Union People's Commissariat, but of the whole state of the Republic. Didn't you read that Clemenceau said, "I'll move Poland and Romania"? How will you demobilize the army? That's talk, not serious debate. We demobilize a small part, we have to keep the rest in case. And for that, how can we do it? The Petrograd and Voronezh workers can't make it. If they could get there, we wouldn't demobilize them. People say: I don't want to sit in the barracks, I want to help the construction. This is ridiculous, if you treat it this way, it is a disgrace for understanding the state tasks - it is not even worth polemics. These people will make as many mistakes in the field as we did in the All-Union National Economy and other things, but they will get us out, because without them we will not get bread and butter out of Chelyabinsk, because there is no food apparatus there and there is no time to create one. You cannot defeat a kulak and a bandit with the alphabet of communism6 , you need a proven force. Today the army is in Melitopol province, tomorrow it will be in other places. Any reasonable worker will understand and approve of us. If you want to polemicize, criticize the decisions of the 7th Congress, but I warn you that at the Party Congress and at any meeting of the Central Committee I will beat you. Bureaucracy, red tape, slackness - we are fighting against this slackness and bureaucratism; we must wage war against them. The bloody war is over, and the bloodless war, but the real war, with military discipline and influence, with favoring the one who fights over the one who sits at home, it is not over. In order to wage it, we need not the armies that are between Poland and us, between Denikin and us, in the North Caucasus. What is to be done with these armies? Demobilize them? Nonsense and nonsense. They should be used with the entire apparatus, with the entire Communist vanguard, to gather bread and deliver it. If we didn't stop before shooting thousands, we won't stop before this, and we will save the country with this. (Applause).

Fund 2, op. 1, d. 12500, fol. 10-14 - transcript, typewritten text.

On January 111, 1920, one day before the meeting of the Communist Faction of the All-Russian Central Council of Trade Unions (VCSPU), chaired by Y.H. Lutovinov, a meeting of the Bureau of the Faction was held, the majority of which did not agree with V.I. Lenin's position on the correlation between collective methods and one-man management of the national economy. Having discussed the tactics of the faction meeting of January 12, 1920, the bureau decided: "a) To oppose at the meeting of the faction the theses of Trotsky and others, if any, to the theses of the bureau. 6) To entrust the commission consisting of ts. Ryazanov, Tomsky, and Lozovsky, taking as a basis the theses of T. Tomsky, to work out the theses of the bureau. Tomsky, to work out the theses. Before the faction 12/1 at exactly 6 o'clock to organize a meeting of the bureau to hear the theses developed by the commission" (RCCHIDNI, f. 17, op. 112, d. 5, fol. 81).

For M.P. Tomsky's theses "Organization of the management of the national economy" see ibid., fol. 75-79.

At the first meeting of the faction on January 12, 1920, A.I.Rykov, M.P.Tomsky, P.G.Smidovich, V.P.Nogin, V.I.Lenin, Y.Larin, N.I.Bukharin spoke. The minutes of the next meeting of the faction have not survived.

The full transcript of Lenin's speech is printed for the first time; some fragments from it were quoted: Lenin V.I. Works. 3rd ed., vol. XXV, p. 593; History of the CPSU. Т. 3, book 2. M., 1968, pp. 375-376; Trotsky L.D.. Stalin's School of Falsifications. M., 1990, p. 60.

2Obviously, we mean L.D.Trotsky's theses of December 16, 1919 on the issue of demobilization of the army, militia system and labor conscription. They have been preserved in the RCCHIDNI with Lenin's note: "Trotsky's Theses" (see: V.I.Lenin. Biographical Chronicle. Vol. 8, pp. 123 and 133).

3VII All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers', Peasants', Red Army and Labor Cossack Deputies was held in Moscow from December 5 to 9, 1919. 1366 deputies were present at the Congress, there were seven issues. V.I.Lenin made a political report to the VTsIK and SNK on December 5 (see: Lenin V.I. Complete Collected Works, vol. 39, pp. 387-414), a closing speech on the report on December 6 (see: ibid., pp. 415-425), a speech in the organizational section on December 8 (see: ibid., pp. 426-431) and others. Of the documents adopted by the Congress, the most important are the resolutions on peace (see: Decrees of Soviet Power. Vol. VI. M., 1973, pp. 339-341), on the organization of food affairs (see: ibid., pp. 351-353), on the organization of fuel affairs (see: ibid., pp. 355-358), and on Soviet construction (see: ibid., pp. 358-364).

4Which articles and speeches by A. I. Rykov, Y. Larin, and A. Lomov are criticized by Lenin is not precisely established. Probably one of them is A.I.Rykov's article in the newspaper "Economic Life" No. 294 of December 30, 1919. The leading article "Our Tasks" of Pravda of January 13, 1920 (the day after the faction meeting) stated that the center of gravity of state economic policy was "the use of living force and the organization of labor." "To hope, as is hoped by Vol. Rykov ("Economic Life" No. 294) for obtaining machines by foreign trade is utopian."

The 53rd Army was created by a directive of the Eastern Front Command of July 20, 1918. It participated in the battles against the White Chekhs and White Guards near Zlatoust, Chelyabinsk, Yekaterinburg, Perm, Petropavlovsk and Omsk.

On January 10, 1920 the Revolutionary Military Council of the 3rd Army in a telegram to the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic proposed to use military units of the army in the restoration of the economy of the Urals - Yekaterinburg, Chelyabinsk and Tobolsk provinces (see: The Trotsky papers. 1917-1922. V. 2, p. 2-6). The Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic welcomed the army's proposal and informed the government about it. On January 12, Lenin in a telegram to the Revolutionary Military Council of the 3rd Army said that he approved the initiative of the army. In January the issue was considered at a meeting of the Sovnarkom. On January 15 Lenin signed on behalf of the Defense Council a decree on the 1st revolutionary army of labor (see: Decrees of Soviet power. Vol. VI, pp. 96-99). On January 17 and 18, the issue of the use of military units on the economic front was discussed in the Politburo of the Central Committee of the RCP(b), and it was decided to create the Kuban-Grozny, Ukrainian, Kazan and Petrograd armies of labor.

6V.I.Lenin is referring to the book by N.I.Bukharin and E.A.Preobrazhensky "The ABC of Communism: A Popular Explanation of the Program of the RCP(b)" M., 1920.