ON THE WORK OF THE STATISTICAL AND ACCOUNTING–DISTRIBUTION DEPARTMENTS
CENTRAL COMMITTEE OF THE RCP(b)
February 14, 1922
Comrade Molotov!
After completing the questionnaire—or rather, the form used in the latest membership census of the RCP—No. 173, I have come to the firm conviction that the statistical work within the Central Committee (and, likely, the entire accounting–distribution apparatus) is utterly botched and unfit for purpose.
Either you have a fool in charge of statistics, or else some of those “departments” (if such institutions are indeed called by that name within the Central Committee) are staffed by fools and pedants who occupy key positions—while it is clear that you simply lack the time to oversee matters properly.

1. The head of the Statistical Department must be dismissed.

2. Both this department and the Accounting–Distribution Department must be thoroughly overhauled.

Otherwise, while we “struggle against bureaucracy”… we are in fact breeding, right under our own noses, the most disgraceful forms of bureaucratic inefficiency—and the most absurd kind of stupidity.

The Central Committee wields immense power. Its potential is colossal: we distribute 200–400 thousand party workers, and through them, tens of thousands upon tens of thousands of non‑party members.

And yet this gigantic communist undertaking has been utterly corrupted by mindless bureaucracy!
All censuses must be completed within a single month.
The preparation and execution of these censuses should be streamlined to the utmost, so that they too can be finished in just one month.
Then, we should disband nine-tenths of the Statistical Department—and an equal proportion of the Accounting–Distribution Department within the Central Committee—and begin rebuilding these departments from scratch.

LETTER TO V. M. MOLOTOV
You need to free yourself from petty tasks (shifting them onto clerks and junior officials) and devote your full attention to the duties of Political Secretary and Head of the Division responsible for organizational work, record‑keeping, and related functions.

Was there a census of “responsible workers”? The results were, quite obviously, zero—and in all likelihood, even worse than zero.

Please write to me or give me a call; we can discuss this matter in greater detail.
We need to compile cards for several hundred—perhaps as a first step—of the Party’s most prominent cadres, categorizing them according to their roles: propagandists, administrators, agitators, educators, and the like, along with evaluations of their performance (based on their tenure—say, the last five positions held)—provided by a select group of four to six individuals. Yet we spend our time chasing after thousands upon thousands, playing bureaucratic games while failing to learn how to allocate people effectively.

With Lenin’s warm regards, First published in 1959 in Volume XXXVI of the Lenin Collection.

Printed from manuscript