ON ACCOUNTABILITY AND ON THE GUIDANCE PROVIDED BY THE COUNCIL OF LABOR AND DEFENSE
1. At every level, provincial and district economic conferences must be established, maintaining the same relationship to the provincial and district executive committees as the Council of Labor and Defense does to the Sovnarkom.
The administrative offices or secretariats should be unified. All work must be conducted through the apparatuses of the relevant departments, without the creation of a separate administrative structure.

2. At the local level, the lowest organs of the Council of Labor and Defense should be village councils and rural soviets; in factory and urban settlements, they should be district councils, district economic councils, and factory committees. Volost executive committees either fully assume the duties of volost economic councils or designate several of their members to form volost economic conferences.

3. Mandatory accountability is established: all economic conferences must report their activities to the Council of Labor and Defense. In doing so, they must be guided by the Directive of the Council of Labor and Defense, which is issued concurrently with this resolution.
Reports from regional economic councils, provincial and district economic councils must be printed in no fewer than 100 copies (with three copies sent to the Council of Labor and Defense, one each to the largest national libraries—the Rumyantsev Library in Moscow and the Public Library in Petrograd—and one to the library of each provincial economic council). The reporting period shall be every two months (three or four months?).

DRAFT RESOLUTION OF THE COUNCIL OF LABOR AND DEFENSE
Reports from the lower-level organs must be submitted in writing—one copy to the provincial economic council, one to the Council of Labor and Defense; reports must be submitted at least twice a year.
Attached to the report for the Council of Labor and Defense should be systematically selected issues of local newspapers or clippings therefrom, devoted to matters of local economic life, as well as all printed materials pertaining to these issues.
Local staff from the Central Statistical Administration and the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection should be involved in the preparation of these reports.
Each local institution is obligated to promptly appoint and notify the Council of Labor and Defense of the names of individuals responsible for the timely preparation of reports—both for each subsection of the report and for its overall editing—as well as their deputies.

4. The newspaper “Economic Life” No. 98 is transformed into an organ of the Council of Labor and Defense.
Guided by the same Directive, it must publish systematic summaries of data on local economic activities, alongside its current content. The systematic recording and analysis of practical experience in all economic endeavors across the RSFSR, together with the formulation of guiding directives based on this experience, must become the primary task of “Economic Life.”
The editorial board must select and expand the circle of local correspondents—both party members and non‑party members—in order to gain firsthand insight into local operations.
Central Printing is tasked with ensuring that “Economic Life” is properly delivered in two copies to every provincial, district, and volost library, while these libraries are responsible for binding and storing both copies, making them available for use by the entire population.
Written May 19–20, 1921.
First published in 1959 in Lenin’s Collected Works, Volume XXXVI

Printed from manuscript