Letter of L.D.Trotsky

To all members of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the RCP(b) for information to Comrades Lenin, Kamenev, Stalin, Zinoviev, Molotov.

One of the most important questions, both for the whole Party and for Soviet work, is the relationship between the Party and the state apparatus. Meanwhile, this question is bypassed in the theses, and since it is touched upon (with regard to economic preparation, etc.) - it pushes us on the wrong path.

Without freeing the party, as a party, from the function of direct management and superintendence, it is impossible to purify the party from bureaucratism and the economy from promiscuity. This is the basic question. Such a "policy", when at the meetings of the provincial committee the questions of the sowing campaign of the province, of the leasing or not leasing of a factory are decided in passing, is pernicious. And it does not get any better in the district committee or in the central committee. Such a method is propaganda by action against serious specialization, against responsibility, against studying a question in practice, against respect for special knowledge, against serious, acceptable, properly organized work.

Faced with the most flagrant facts of direct intrusion by the gubernatorial committees into the work of justice on certain questions, the Central Committee repulsed such tendencies. But by its whole practice, unnoticed by itself, it actually imposed this way of acting, which depersonalizes all state organs, removes responsibility for actual work, deprives them of self-confidence, and at the same time contributes to the extreme bureaucratization of party work.

We have now passed a resolution which finally frees the trade unions from the functions of management in the economy. With the change of economic policy this is certainly right. But for the cause, i.e., for immediate success, it makes absolutely no difference whether the incursions come on the line of the trade unions or on the line of the Central Committee, the gubkoms, uyezdkoms and Party cells. If the new economic policy demands that the trade unions be trade unions, the same policy demands that the party be the party. The preparation for the correct performance of commercial and generally economic functions is not the task of the Party, but that of the corresponding economic organs, to which the Party provides stable leadership and enables them to select workers and educate them without random and incompetent intrusions from outside. The Party makes clear to the working masses the importance and significance of trade operations as a method of socialist construction. The Party fights against the prejudices that hinder the proper development of economic activity. The Party fights against attempts to use the new economic policy to instill bourgeois mores in the Communist Party itself. The Party firmly establishes what can and cannot be done. But the Party does not direct commercial operations, for it is incapable of doing so. The Party does not educate for economic operations, and in particular for commercial operations, for it is incapable of doing so.

The party has power in its hands, but it governs only through a properly functioning state apparatus. 99/100 of the questions that rise to its resolution it brings back, with the indication that there is nothing partisan about them.

At the same time, the Party is concentrating much more than before on the theoretical education of Party youth.

10/III-22.

L. Trotsky.

Lenin's note to the archive

Fond 2, op. 2, d. 1164 - V.I.Lenin's note - autograph, L.D.Trotsky's letter - copy.

1L.D.Trotsky criticizes the draft theses to the XI Congress of the RCP(b) "On strengthening and new tasks of the party", prepared by G.E.Zinoviev. The first discussion of the draft took place at a meeting of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP(b) on March 8, 1922. The draft was approved. Later Trotsky's criticism was taken into account by the author. On March 17, 1922 the theses were published in Pravda (see: Eleventh Congress of the RCP(b). Stenographic Report. Moscow, 1961, pp. 680-687).