V. I.

Lenin

715

LETTER TO G. Y. SOKOLNIKOV ON QUESTIONS OF FINANCIAL POLICY

Copies to Comrades Tsyurupa, Rykov and Stalin (for the Politbureau)

Comrade Sokolnikov:

I have heard Comrade Tsyurupa’s account of your project
for an internal grain loan, and have looked over the draft
text myself. This looks to me like self-deception. How can you prove that this will yield anything practical at
all? It seems to me that, on the contrary, we should conclude that this will worsen our situation by wrecking the
emission, i.e., inducing the speculative market to resort
to the very measure of fighting against us which it has been
using with such success. In fact, the market has learned,
it seems, to inflate prices following the growth of emission
so fast that the emission has ceased to extract any real
values from the population whatsoever, becoming an empty
game and empty self-consolation on our part. (By the way,
there should be precise data about the real values being
extracted through the emission. They should be summed up
in the briefest form at least weekly. Is this being done?)

I think it is time we abandoned the harmful self-consolation, and turned to really revolutionary measures, on the
one hand—an increase in the collection of all taxes; on
the other hand—a most rapid and vigorous reduction of staffs. In doing this, we should not stop at closing down,
partly without any designation of date, partly until the
autumn, of a number of the largest departments in some
People’s Commissariats, and even of this or that People’s
Commissariat.

I wrote to Dzerzhinsky today to check up on whether we are seriously working to close down the third category
railways. I very much fear that without revolutionary measures of this kind the congress resolution on financial
policy [1] remains on paper, and that in general we are lagging behind life, risking to find ourselves helpless in
face of the impending disaster.
Let me have your opinion. [2]

Lenin

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Notes:
[1]
A reference to the resolution of the Eleventh Congress of the
R.C.P.(B.), “On Financial Policy” (see KPSS v rezolutsiyakh i resheniyakh syezdov, konferentsii i plenumov Ts Ka , Part I, 1954,
pp. 613–18).

[2]
In a reply letter to Lenin on May 4, 1922, G. Y. Sokolnikov
argued that, the issue of a grain loan would facilitate
implementation of the effective measures proposed by Lenin to produce a
balanced budget, reduce the amount of newly issued money (the
bank-note emission), and withdraw a part of the money already
in circulation.

On May 13, 1922, the C.P.C. approved the draft decision on
the grain loan, and submitted it for examination by the Third
Session of the All-Russia C.E.C. The first internal short-term
grain loan was issued by the People’s Commissariat for Finance,
under a decision of the All-Russia C.E.C. of May 20, 1922, to a
total amount, of up to 10 million poods of rye (in grain) with
repayments by the state from December 1, 1922 to January 31,
1923 (see Izvestia VTsIK No. 112, May 21, 1922).