I would very much like, comrades, to visit your congress and speak on the principal food questions on the agenda of your conference. But, unfortunately, I am unable to fulfil my wish and am obliged to content myself with the present brief telephonogram to you. I think it necessary to point out to you, comrades, that the successful results of your extremely arduous and responsible work recently prompted the Council of People’s Commissars to adopt a decision expressing satisfaction with the successes achieved in the procurement activities of the food supply organs. There can be no doubt that over the past two years and more the food supply organs have become organisationally stronger and have grown. This we owe to a considerable extent to your efforts.

But, of course, we cannot stop at what has been achieved. The food front, the most important after the war front, confronts you with a whole series of new tasks, without the solution of which neither the further consolidation of the workers’ and peasants’ power nor the solution of the immediate, urgent tasks of economic construction will be possible.

I hope also that in the matter of economic construction you will help establish correct relations with the co-operatives on the basis of the decisions of the Party congress{72}, so as to solve successfully the difficult but rewarding task of transforming petty-bourgeois co-operation into socialist co-operation.

The successes you have already achieved in food work oblige you, to a greater extent than before, at all costs to cope with the new tasks and thus to approach the actual solution of the food problem, for to whom much is given, of him much will be required; and by your work you have shown that you have already been given not a little. Permit me, then, to wish you success in settling the questions on the order of the day of your conference, and afterwards in your daily work, to which you will return in the localities after the conference, with, I am sure, redoubled energy.