V. I.

Lenin

TO A. L. SHEINMAN

February 28

Comrade Sheinman, Your words that the State Bank is now a “powerful
apparatus” (Feb. 22) made me laugh. Let me say in confidence:
this is the height of childishness, the height of
Communist-mandarin childishness.

A “powerful apparatus”! The “powerful apparatus”= transferring from one state pocket into another such
remarkable “real values” as Soviet rubles.... Current accounts
expressed in gold rubles (and even that falsely, not at the
real parity) 2.8–7.9–10.3 million rubles (on Dec. 16, Jan.
16, and Feb. 1). Ha-ha! And how are they made up? 90–98
per cent are revenues from our state trusts , i.e., the same
official bits of paper from the same bureaucrats!

At present the State Bank=a bureaucratic paper game.
There is the truth for you, if you want to hear not the sweet
communist-official lies (with which everyone feeds you as a high mandarin), but the truth .

And if you don’t want to look at this truth with open eyes, through all the communist lying, you are a man who
has perished in the prime of life in a swamp of official lying.
Now that is an unpleasant truth, but it is the truth.

Either to seek and gradually to find (testing and checking
one hundred times) people capable of organising trade on
behalf of the State Bank, checking on trade, encouraging
business-like traders, closing down allegedly commercial,
but in reality communist-bureaucratic trading and factory
“Potemkin villages” [1] —or the entire State Bank and all
its work is zero, worse than zero, self-deception with a new
bureaucratic rattle.

And until you prove to me by acts, backed up by experience, that the State Bank has begun to find such men,
inspectors, agents, etc., until then there is nothing to talk
about: I won’t believe a word you say.

Please don’t be angry for this frankness.

Yours, Lenin