Speech To The R.C.P.(B.) Group

At The Eighth Congress Of Soviets

During The Debate

On The Report

Of The All-Russia Central Executive Committee

And The Council Of People’s Commissars

Concerning Home And Foreign Policies

December 22

Comrades, allow me to begin by touching on certain remarks
made by speakers and answering notes, at least the more important
ones. From Comrade Korzinov’s criticism I have picked out the idea
concerning engineers and agronomists. We must push forward with the
training of engineers and agronomists from among the workers and
peasants. This is beyond all question, and the Soviet government is taking
steps in this direction, but we cannot count on very quick results; it may
not take as long as electrification, but it will take at least several
years; so it is wrong of Comrade Korzinov to suggest that all other matters
be set aside until we have our own agronomists. Bight now we have got to
find and get the best agronomists, call them to our meetings, demand from
them an account and thus single out the industrious and educated men from
the rest.

Comrade Korzinov has landed in the opposition for opposition’s sake
when he says that the decree on concessions should have been published
earlier. But our work at the Council of People’s Commissars and the Council
of Labour and Defence is such that we have to react at once, and the position with us is such that, given no differences of opinion in the
C.C. and C.P.C., decisions are taken at once. If the decree on concessions
is

wrong, [5] then we should propose its repeal, because the chief
concession with Vanderlip will not become a formal agreement until next
March.

At the time we published this decree our main purpose was, and still
remains, to conclude a trade agreement as quickly as possible and offer the
bait of concessions to the capitalists. I dealt with this political aspect
of the case in my report to the R.C.P. group and heard no objections at the
time. I was therefore surprised when Comrade Ignatov, bent on being
opposition-minded, said that we had slipped up on Vanderlip, that we hadn’t
found out who he was. I read the statement by the Deputy People’s Commissar
for Foreign Trade that all inquiries concerning the group Vanderlip
represented had been made, had been confirmed abroad and remained
unrefuted. Vanderlip himself had pointed out that no agreement could be
concluded until after the presidential elections, when the Republican
candidate would take office, since such an agreement would have to be
sanctioned by the American Government.

This is an agreement under which the American Government is to receive
a naval base. Consequently, even if this Washington Vanderlip, about whom
Comrade Ryazanov went into such irrelevant details-as often happens with
him-even if he did represent nobody and was just a swindler and the
proposed agreement was to provide for the Government of the United States
receiving a naval base aimed against Japan, there could be no question of
our being swindled, as the President of the United States would really be a
member of the Republican party. After Vanderlip we shall be in a position
to form a conclusive opinion about this trade agreement. Ignatov’s entire
criticism falls to the ground; he simply did not pay attention to what was
said at our meeting.

Comrade Korzinov said that in the matter of Poland we should have given
warning earlier. We have here an extremely difficult situation, and there
was a moment when our troops were on the move and the Central Committee had
reason to believe that despite the complicated situation we could achieve
much by launching an offensive.

At such a time when, after Curzon’s Note of

July 11, [6] we had to give a reply within a few days, how could we be
expected to call Party meetings to discuss the matter? Besides, every
comrade knows that if we could have passed over to an offensive war at the
right moment we would have done so without hesitation. And there would
never have been any opposition to it anywhere. What we did see was an
opposition in reverse, when we were accused of not pursuing a sufficiently
active foreign policy. That there have been mistakes here, there is no
doubt, but neither is there any doubt that arguing about them would be a
sheer waste of time, as we have other things to think of besides our old
activities. When time has receded, when all the documents and material will
have been collected, we shall be able to fully appreciate our
mistake. Therefore, I see nothing, absolutely nothing, in Comrade
Korzinov’s speech other than a desire to seek opposition. At another time,
when we are in more favourable conditions, we shall make the same use of
our successes. And so long as the Party does not forbid it, we shall always
assume the offensive. I don’t think that the Party or any of its members
will propose a reverse policy at any meeting.

In regard to Comrade Gusev’s remark, I must say that I made a mistake
in introducing polemics in an official report, and therefore I have already
suggested that this part of the report be deleted from the official text
and greetings to Soviet Armenia added-through an unforgivable oversight on
my part this was omitted in the report.

Comrade Gusev is wrong in saying that I boasted of my modesty-the point
is that in passing over to a more serious practical integration of the
economic commissariats and the implementation of a single economic plan,
the thing we had to be afraid of was project-mongering.

Comrade Gusev says that I did not criticise his booklet [7] as a whole. But that is the central point: Comrade Trotsky
and Comrade Rykov are invited to drop the departments and join the Council
of Defence, which, not being a depart-mental body, will set up a new
apparatus of its own. I cannot understand how, after three years of Soviet
rule, one can raise and support such a question here. I am at a loss for
words to express my perplexity. It is so ill-advised, it means knocking down the department in one place and
setting it up in another. It means failure to understand what our apparatus
is. I don’t know whether Comrade Popov has managed to print the leaflet he
gave me. It contains an extract from the 1920 census results. You know that
this census has been satisfactorily carried out and has yielded a mass of
valuable information concerning the number of Soviet office employees in
Moscow. We took a similar census before this in 1919, but now we have a
fuller one. It shows that we have no less than 230,000 office employees, of
which 30,000, or even more, are in the most important commissariats, and
70,000 in the Moscow

Soviet. [8] Try to imagine these figures, ponder over them, and then
you will say to yourself-well, if you take an influential man, one who
enjoys the greatest authority and has created a certain style of work in
his department, take him out of that department and put him in charge of
several united departments, you can expect nothing but chaos. Is that the
way to fight bureaucratism? It is simply a frivolous attitude towards the
work, absolutely unrealistic. I understand what a serious thing
bureaucratism is, but no provision for its abolition is made in the Party
Programme. It is not a problem for a congress, it is a problem for a whole
epoch, and you have a special report devoted to this question.

Does anyone really believe that by a mere stroke of the pen, by taking
comrades, who have created the best form of organisation in one or another
of the most important departments, and transferring them to the Council of
Labour and Defence, you will be getting a new department with indefinite
powers that will not perform economically unifying functions. When the
practical question arose in the Council of Labour and Defence as to what
was economic and what was not, not only the Foreign Trade Commissariat, but
the Finance Commissariat as well claimed that it was an economic
commissariat. And can you conduct any economic work without the
Commissariat for Public Health. Of course, when we shall have made big
progress in economic reconstruction the relation of economic commissariats
to non-economic ones may become different after we have achieved important
successes in the work of changing our economic foundations. At present we
have nothing of the kind. Therefore, to treat the departmental question as
lightly as Gusev does-in other parts of the booklet, by the way, he repeats
some of the excellent ideas expressed in his previous booklet [9] —is absolutely wrong.

I shall say nothing about Ryazanov’s speech, which has been
sufficiently refuted by Kamenev. I shall merely mention that both Ryazanov
and Gusev, who has followed his bad example, have been talking about having
heard, perhaps from me in the Council of People’s Commissars, that I wanted
to, one said drown myself, the other said shoot myself. If comrades are
going to take a man at his angry word, uttered when he is very tired, and
make him speak about it before an audience of a thousand, I don’t think
these people can expect their speeches to be taken seriously. (

Applause .)

It’s quite possible that we have a lot of vermicelli affairs in the
Council of People’s Commissars-that’s true. If Maximovsky has made this an
object on which to display his oppositionist bent and made a special point
of it, I must say there is not and cannot be any government institution
which does not have to deal with vermicelli affairs. You omitted to mention
that the C.C. dealt with questions involving policy. So long as the ruling
Party governs, so long as this Party has to decide all questions concerned
with various appointments, you will not allow important state appointments
to be made by anyone but the ruling party. When all is said and done, the
question of who is to make this or that policy is of secondary
importance. Hasn’t the C. C. vermicelli affairs? Plenty of them. Aren’t
there agendas, on completing which and running through a dozen items of
business, you would not only say you’d be glad to drown yourself, but
something worse still. I repeat, to catch me at this sort of statement is
not very difficult, but to come out here and make it an object for an
oppositionist stand and speak against vermicellism is frivolous.

If, in a body which in general establishes only principles, we
attempted to set up a separate body to deal with petty, practical,
vermicelli affairs, we would only make things worse. Because we would be
tearing generalisation away from the facts of life, and such a break would
be sheer day-dreaming and frivolity. Questions in the Central Committee cannot be divided into questions of principle and trivial questions,
because in every trifle a principle may be involved.

It is not a question of Ivan or Sidor. It is not a question of putting
Sidor in Ivan’s place or vice versa. What if they refuse? What if this Ivan
and Sidor are both people’s commissars—what’s to be done then? The
C.C. has a Secretariat, an Orgbureau, a Politbureau, finally, plenums of
the Central Committee are held, and very often questions come before the
Central Committee Plenum that are as trivial and tedious as anything, and
some that you sit over for several hours until you feel like drowning
yourself. But to draw a line between trivial questions and questions of
principle is to undermine the very foundation of democratic centralism. At
the same time it cannot be said that the Central Committee dumps its
vermicelli onto other institutions. So far we have not been able to alter
the Constitution and have been working autonomously. The fact that on some
questions we have arrived at a agreement and on others there have been
debates is only natural and inevitable, considering the apparatus we
have. The fact that the C.C. is becoming an organ of control, and that in
the general distribution of work it has fallen to Comrade Kalinin to
supervise agitation and verification, and that he is required to give his
personal impressions obtained during his trips and at work—this gives no
grounds for shouting about the Council of People’s Commissars referring all
questions to the C.C and vice versa. It means introducing further
confusion and turmoil while things remain essentially unchanged. The
higher bodies are needed for the purpose of control and for turning down
certain questions.

People here have spoken and complained about the Presidium of the
All-Russia Central Executive Committee being swamped with business, and
though it is our highest body, it is swamped with purely vermicelli
affairs. But I would ask all those present here, how many of you have read
a dozen reports of our proceedings? Who has read them from beginning to
end? Probably no one, because they are dull, you can’t wade through them. I
must say that every member of our Party and every citizen of the Republic
has a right to bring any question, any circumstance, however trivial,
before the All-Russia Central Executive Committee. This question will go through the whole ladder, through the bureau, etc. till it
gets to the C.E.C. Presidium, where it will be examined. And so it will be
until the complete communist re-education of the working people, which will
come within several decades after electrification has been finally
completed. In this respect we are not afraid of changes.

I shall now deal with some of the notes. Comrade Minkin writes:

Did Comrade Shlyapnikov inform the Council of People’s
Commissars of the disgraceful goings on at the Commissariat for Foreign
Trade, or was this being kept for announcement at the Congress? If he did
make such a statement, what has been done to eliminate them?

To answer this question I consulted Comrade Serebryakov who is better
informed than I am. He was appointed by the Central Committee to the
commission, the other members of which were Dzerzhinsky, Krestinsky and
Lezhava, set up to take steps towards improving the relations between the
Commissariat for Foreign Trade and the Commissariat for Internal Affairs,
since our representatives abroad had information that these relations were
anything but satisfactory. At my request Serebryakov gives the following
answer to the note of delegate Minkin: “Comrade Minkin states ...”
( reads ).

After this commission a subcommission was set up. It is very easy to
play at opposition, since there are disgraceful goings on with us in every
commissariat, and the infelicitous mention of guarantees and 30,000
employees in the commissariat’s technical publishing house is very
characteristic in the sense that you can always find scandalously
disgraceful things here. You will find the same thing in any division of
the Red Army. Nevertheless our Red Army has been winning victories all the
time.

The thing is to apply in good time to the institution that has to
remedy matters, and not talk about it here, where we cannot collect
accurate information about what Comrade Ryazanov has heard of this or that
person and has not checked it or discovered the true facts. Is that
democratic centralism? It is not at all democratic, and not at all
centralism, but disorder and the introduction of chaos. Complaints should
be lodged with Party bodies. If that body does not fulfil its duty it should be made to give a strict account of
itself.

Among the notes that have been sent up there is the question of
reducing the army. On this subject Comrade Trotsky will make a special
statement, and you will decide whether this question should be dealt with
today or at the next special meeting of the R.C.P. group. I can tell you
that after an ad hoc commission on demobilisation headed by Trotsky and
Dzerzhinsky was set up, the C.C. decided to start demobilisation, and this
is now going on. It is being dealt with by the military department, and you
will receive an exact report.

Is the Council of Labour and Defence regarded as an interim body called upon to unite the economic commissariats and then to be
abolished, or i it the basis of a future integrated economic plan? Also, on
what apparatus does the Council rely locally?

This question has not been settled, and we believe that to raise it now
would be a waste of time. The order of the day now is a check-up of the
organisation of the commissariats. The Council of People’s Commissars has
set up an organisational body which is to revise the apparatus of the
People’s Commissariats with a view to the tasks confronting them, and in
this connection, to examine the question of staffs. To busy ourselves at
the present time with setting up another apparatus in place of the Council
of Labour and Defence is impossible until the question of electrification
is settled. Various material on electrification will soon be handed out to
you, and the Council of Labour and Defence will have to reckon with what
the verification of this material and the reports will have to say. We now
have an organ that we need, and, good or bad, we have in any case been
working with it and coping with the tasks confronting us. We have no
intention of embarking on reforms until we have practically tested how the
integrated economic plan will be carried out. This is definitely a case of
look before you leap.

Who is going to conclude concession contracts in the Far
East, we or the buffer state, in either case—why?

This, comrades, is a delicate question. Buffer state [10] —it is such an embarrassing definition when we are asked:

You or the buffer? On the one hand we have the buffer, on the other, the
corresponding Party Bureau of the R.C.P. The buffer’s a buffer, it’s to
enable us to win time and then beat the Japanese. I don’t know whom
Kamchatka belongs to. Actually the Japanese are in possession, and they do
not relish the idea of our giving it away to the Americans. We, are
consulted, our directives are complied with, and nobody has protested
against our negotiations with Vanderlip, no single group of Party comrades
has considered the question important enough to demand its being discussed
at the plenum of the Central Executive Committee and examined in the
Control Commission. This is the right of every Party member, and no one has
used this right. The person who has learned the facts which led to the
postponement of an agreement till March will not try to make use of this
right.

What is your view of the trade unions at the present moment in connection with the concessions? Is it true that you stand for
the organisation of a trade union of peasants?

I must say that the Party’s Programme mentions the necessity of seeking
new forms of trade unions that would unite the poor sections of the peasantry. [11] This task has been posed in the Party’s
Programme and I have often pointed out that although we are not in a
position at present to solve this problem, we must not give it up. We must
not confine ourselves to the work of

Vserabotzem, [12] which is so weak, and which cannot give us outstanding
workers. So long as we have a levelling process taking place among the
peasantry, a levelling and unification of the working peasants, the
non-kulak section of the peasantry, this problem cannot be removed from the
order o the day of socialist construction. To strengthen the work of the
trade unions we must extend them not only to the rural proletariat, but to
all the working peasantry. How this is to be done we do not know yet. We
have set this task in the Party’s Programme, we shall return to it many
times and get it settled in a practical manner from different aspects. That
is all I can say now on this question.

With the granting of concessions, the trade unions, naturally, will
have important tasks imposed upon them-those or checking, supervising, and maintaining contact with the workers who will
be employed in these concessions. How this task will be handled in
practice, I cannot say at the moment. To raise this question at the present
time would be inadvisable, as the trade unions have more important tasks
facing them.

In our fight against bureaucratism we certainly need the help of the
trade unions. We must rely on them. This is basically provided for in the
Party’s

Programme. [13] This shows what a long struggle is needed and what
systematic work faces us. When we shall have data that in such-and-such a
workmen’s settlement the business of supervision is organised in
such-and-such a way and definite results have been achieved, while in
such-and-such a block, uyezd, etc. things are different-then we shall be
able to weigh things, get them moving, and there will not only be talk
about the “agitpotato” but we shall be in a position to check what steps
have been taken in practice and on this ground apply practical measures
that have already yielded results.

| First published in 1963 in the Fifth Russian Edition of the Collected Works , Vol. 42 | |
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| Printed from the shorthand record | |