Speech at the Third All-Russia Congress of Councils of National Economy. January 27, 1920. Newspaper Report
Речь на III Всероссийском съезде советов народного хозяйства 27 января 1920 г. Газетный отчет
Date: 1920
Source: PSS vol 40
Translated by: AI (Claude)

Comrade Lenin says that he will only briefly touch upon those questions with which he has had to deal most in recent times. One such question is the organization of management, the question of collegiality and one-man management. In the disputes being conducted on this question, the matter is placed on the ground of abstract reasoning, in which the preferability of collegiality over one-man management is proved. But this takes us far from the practical tasks of the present time. Such reasoning transports us to that stage of the initial building of Soviet power which we have already outgrown. It is time to move on to a more businesslike approach.

Collegiality, as the basic type of organization of Soviet administration, represents something embryonic, necessary at the first stage, when one must build anew. But once more or less stable forms have been established, the transition to practical work is connected with one-man management as the system which best ensures the optimal utilization of human abilities and a real, not merely verbal, verification of work.

The experience of Soviet power in the matter of military construction cannot be regarded as an isolated experience. War encompasses all types of all areas of construction. The building of our army could lead to successful results only because it was created in the spirit of the general Soviet construction, on the basis of the class relations which make themselves felt in any area of construction. Here we see the same thin layer of the leading class of the proletariat and the mass of the peasantry. And if in other areas the essence of this relationship has not manifested itself with full clarity, then it received its real test in the army, which stands before the enemy and pays dearly for every mistake. One must think deeply about this experience. It passed, developing in a regular pattern, from casual, vague collegiality through collegiality raised to a system of organization permeating all institutions of the army, and now, as a general tendency, has arrived at one-man management as the only correct way of setting up work. In any Soviet work you will encounter a small number of conscious proletarians, a mass of less developed people, and as the subsoil of all this, an enormous mass of peasantry with all their habits of individual farming, and consequently of free trade and speculation, which the Mensheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries, and non-party people call freedom, and which we call a legacy of capitalism. These are the conditions under which we must act, and they require corresponding methods of action. And the experience of the army showed us the regular development of the organization of management from the initial forms of collegiality to one-man management, which is now implemented there in no less than fifty percent of cases.

Collegiality at best produces an enormous waste of energy and does not satisfy the speed and precision of work demanded by the conditions of centralized large-scale industry. If you take the defenders of collegiality, you will see in their resolutions an immoderate abstractness of formulation to the effect that every member of a collegium must bear individual responsibility for the fulfilment of assignments. This has become an ABC for us. But each of you who has practical experience knows that out of a hundred cases there is one where this is applied in practice. In the overwhelming majority of cases this remains only on paper. None of the members of the collegium receive precise assignments, and they are not carried out under personal responsibility. We, in general, have no verification of work whatsoever. Imagine that the Central Committee of a trade union puts forward Vasily Vasilyevich Vasilyev as a candidate, and you ask for a list of assignments completed by him and verified by competent people. Nothing of the kind will you receive. We are all only just beginning to get down to real efficiency.

Our fault is that we dream of accomplishing everything by our own forces. Our most acute deficiency is the lack of workers, yet we do not know how to take them from the ranks of ordinary workers and peasants, among whom there is a mass of talents -- both administrative and organizational. It will be much better if we move as quickly as possible from general and mostly completely fruitless disputes to a businesslike approach. Then we shall actually fulfil the duties of organizers of the advanced class and shall bring forth hundreds and thousands of new organizational talents. We must promote them, test them, give them assignments, make these assignments more complex. I hope that we shall achieve the result that, after the congress of councils of national economy, after summing up the work, we shall set out on this road, broaden and multiply the number of organizers, so that the immeasurably narrow stratum which has been worn out over these two years may be replenished and enlarged, for the tasks which we set ourselves, which must lead Russia out of poverty, hunger, and cold, require ten times more organizers who would be responsible before tens of millions.

The second question which interests us most is the question of labour armies.

Here before us is a task concerning the transition between two phases of our activity. The phase which was entirely taken up by war has not yet ended. A whole series of signs indicates that the Russian capitalists will be unable to continue the war. But that they will make attempts to invade Russia is beyond doubt. And we must be on guard. But on the whole and in the main, the war which they unleashed upon us two years ago has been brought to a victorious conclusion, and we are passing on to peaceful tasks.

One must understand the originality of this transition. A country ruined to the last degree, a hungry and cold country where destitution has reached the most desperate level, and in it a people who have risen in their strength and gained confidence in themselves, when they became convinced that they are capable of coping with the whole world -- without exaggeration, with the whole world, for the entire capitalist world has suffered defeat -- and in this peculiar situation, to solve urgent tasks, we put forward the labour army.

We must concentrate on the main thing -- collect grain and bring it to the centre. Any deviation from this, the slightest dissipation of effort, will be the greatest danger, the ruin of our cause. And in order to utilize our apparatus with all possible speed, we must create a labour army. On this you already have the theses of the Central Committee and reports, and I shall not go into the concrete aspects of this question. I should only like to point out that at the moment of transition from civil war to new tasks we must throw everything onto the labour front and concentrate all forces here with maximum effort, with military determination, with merciless determination. Right now we shall not permit any deviations. Putting forward this slogan, we declare that we must strain to the utmost all the living forces of workers and peasants and demand that they give us their full assistance in this. And then, by creating a labour army, by straining all the forces of workers and peasants, we shall fulfil our basic task. We shall succeed in collecting hundreds of millions of poods of grain. We have them. But incredibly devilish efforts are needed, the straining of all the forces of the country, military determination and energy, in order to collect these hundreds of millions of poods of grain and bring them to the centre. Here, in the centre, we shall mainly be engaged in constructing a plan for this and shall mainly talk about this, and all other questions -- questions of financing, industrial construction and all questions concerning broad programmes -- we must not be distracted by these now. Before us stands this fundamental task: to rise up now against the dangerous temptation to be carried away by broad plans and tasks. We must concentrate on the most important and fundamental thing, permitting no diversion from the main task we have set ourselves, namely: to collect grain and products, to collect them by state methods, at fixed prices, by the socialist method of the workers' state and not by the capitalist method of speculation, and to transport them to the centre, breaking through the transport crisis. It will be a crime if anyone forgets this task.

In order to set the fulfilment of our basic task on a more or less correct footing, the leaders of all state organs, in particular the councils of national economy, must for this purpose stimulate activity among tens of millions of workers and peasants. For this a broad plan for the reconstruction of Russia will be given. For this we have enough resources, materials, technical possibilities, raw materials, enough of everything to begin this work of reconstruction from all ends, drawing in all workers and peasants. We shall develop a stubborn struggle, comrades, a struggle that will demand heavy sacrifices in this period on the labour front, but which we must inevitably carry out, since we face hunger, cold, transport breakdown, typhus. With all these calamities we must fight, and from all sides begin to build our state on the basis of large-scale machine industry, in order to make our country cultured and through a correct socialist struggle to get out of the swamp in which the countries of world capitalism and imperialism are now drowning.

Published incompletely on January 28, 1920 in Izvestia VTsIK, No. 18

Published in full on January 29, 1920 in Pravda, No. 19

Printed from the text of Pravda