28/II. 1922.
Comrade Kursky!
With regard to your letter of 23/II (No. 255), in response to my own letter *.
I will endeavor to meet with you in person, though I cannot promise it, as my health is poor.
I hope that, following the meeting of responsible workers convened in connection with my letter, you will write to me again about the practical outcomes of that meeting. It is especially important to establish a factual verification: what is actually being done? What is actually being achieved? What are the successes—and failures—of people’s courts and revolutionary tribunals? How can we take these into account and subject them to proper scrutiny?
How many cases have been brought for abuses related to the New Economic Policy?
How many convictions have been handed down, and what have the penalties been (in general terms, rather than in individual cases)? And so on.
With communist greetings, Lenin
Of particular urgency and importance:
P.S. Regarding the Civil Code: I am unable to delve into the wording of individual articles. My health does not permit it.
I must limit myself to the following points:
1) The People’s Commissariat of Justice must personally oversee and verify who is truly responsible for each major section of the Civil Code.

* See this volume, pp. 396–400. Ed.

2) We must unconditionally adopt everything in the literature and in the experience of Western European countries that serves to protect working people.
3) We must not stop there—this is the most crucial point. We must not follow the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs blindly; we must not seek to please “Europe,” but instead move forward in strengthening the state’s intervention in “private-law relations,” in civil matters.
As for exactly how this should be done, I cannot say, since I am neither able to study the question thoroughly nor even to examine any single code in depth. But it is perfectly clear to me that this task must be accomplished. What threatens us now—namely, the danger of falling short in this area (rather than the danger of overdoing it)—is also entirely clear to me. Precisely before Genoa, we must not falter, not lose heart, and not let slip even the slightest opportunity to expand the state’s intervention in “civil” relations.
Lenin
First published in 1945 in Volume XXXV of the Lenin Collection.

Printed from manuscript