Our State Bank must have a network of commercial agents, starting from the top (something like a traveling bank inspector for commercial affairs, managing billions in turnover) and ending with small and smallest commercial agents at the bottom. If this entire network operates on a percentage basis and learns (and teaches us) to trade well, then we shall capture 9/10 of the entire sum of commercial turnover. This is the only path to the restoration of gold circulation and to the transformation of the NEP from a system of duping communist fools who have power but do not know how to use it into a b a s e for socialism—a base, invincible in a peasant country, against which no force in the world could prevail.

Show this to Sokolnikov. We must press the State Bank and the NKF until we achieve this.

Your Lenin

Written February 18, 1922

First published in 1937 in the journal *Bolshevik* No. 2

Printed from the manuscript