V. I.

Lenin

605

LETTER TO G. V. CHICHERIN

Comrade Chicherin:

1. Please send me, if possible, the official text of
Bonomi’s proposals in the language in which you have received it (it is important for me to have the text of
the provisions as formulated by them). [1]

2. Do you know if any influential Entente newspaper
has carried the text of Clause 1 of these terms, which was
initially published in our newspapers, namely: with the
words “system of property” and not just “system”, as, I
believe, the official text sent, by Bonomi puts it. [2]

I should also ask you to have the Russian Telegraph
Agency’s Foreign Press Service check up whether the words
“system of property” have appeared in any foreign newspaper, and if they have, to let me have the issue.

Lenin

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Notes:
[1]
A reference to the radio telegram from the Chairman of the
Council of Ministers of Italy, Bonomi, on January 13, 1922, in which,
under a decision of the conference of the Allied Supreme Council,
held at Cannes from January 6 to 13, he invited, on behalf of the
Supreme Council, a Soviet Government delegation to take part
in an international economic and financial conference which was
to meet at Genoa in early March 1922.

[2]

Clause 1 of the Cannes resolution, as published in the
Soviet press, said: “No state can claim any right to dictate to
another state the principles on which the latter is to regulate its
system of ownership, and internal economy and government”
( Izvestia VTsIK No. 6, January 10, 1922). This text corresponded with the text of the resolution published in Petit Parisien No. 16385 on January 8. On January 26, G. V. Chicherin
wrote, enclosing the issue of the paper: “I am sending you Petit Parisien with the Cannes resolution and a copy of Bonomi. The
latter has dropped ‘Système de propriété’.”

Lenin attached great importance to the formulation of § 1 of
the Cannes terms, regarding it as an indirect admission of the
bankruptcy of the capitalist system of property, and of the
inevitable existence of a communist system of property alongside it.
Lenin pointed out that the other paragraphs of the Cannes terms,
designed to enslave Soviet Russia by foreign capital, were clearly
at odds with clause one (see present edition, Vol. 33, pp. 356–57).