2 September 1921

FROM THE NOTE OF THE ADMINISTRATIVE DEPARTMENT OF THE COUNCIL OF PEOPLE'S COMMISSARS

Send the following paper from me: to the People's Commissariat for Finance + to the People's Commissariat of Workers' and Peasants' Inspection + to the Chairman of the Small Council of People's Commissars:

I instruct the People's Commissars for Finance and Workers' and Peasants' Inspection (or their deputies) to immediately convene a conference with the participation of the Chairman of the Small Council of People's Commissars and the Administrative Department of the Council of People's Commissars for the purpose of drafting and submitting within a week to the Council of People's Commissars draft decrees to combat the violations of the law indicated here. I draw the attention of the Workers' and Peasants' Inspection to this oversight.

How could the outrages indicated in this paper have been tolerated up to now? In particular, the overspending by the People's Commissariat for Education on theatres?

Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars
Lenin

To the Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars

...On the path of fulfilling the duties assigned to the central and local financial organs, we have recently been encountering exceptionally unfavourable obstacles, chiefly the fact of complete disregard on the part of the executive organs of Soviet power for the instructions of the Constitution concerning the drawing up of estimates and the conduct of expenditures in accordance with them, which has an extremely harmful effect on the general state of the budget and introduces exceptional disturbances into the system of monetary circulation.

For illustration, it will suffice to mention here the following circumstances: 1) in some regions, workers are paid not according to tariff rates but at free market prices, sometimes reaching 700,000 rubles per person per day (the Volga region, western and eastern gubernias); 2) artists and workers in Soviet theatres are remunerated not according to tariff salaries, but with supplements amounting to many hundreds of percent of the latter (while according to the estimate