Date: 1922
Source: ru:PSS/v45

RESOLUTION ON THE WORK OF DEPUTIES (DEPUTIES TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE COUNCIL OF PEOPLE’S COMMISSARS AND THE COUNCIL OF WORKERS’ AND PEASANTS’ DEPUTIES)

I. GENERAL AND PRIMARY TASKS OF THE DEPUTIES

1. The primary task of the deputies—upon which they bear special responsibility and to which all other work must be subordinated—is to ensure the effective implementation of decrees, laws, and resolutions; to streamline the staffing of joint institutions; to oversee the rationalization and simplification of their administrative procedures; and to combat bureaucracy and red tape.

All subsequent tasks are either elaborations of this core mandate or specific supplements to it.

The deputies are charged with:

2. Ensuring that the consideration of Soviet matters in other institutions—whether Soviet or Party bodies (the Presidium of the All‑Russian Central Executive Committee, the Political Bureau and Organizational Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP, and so on—with absolutely no exceptions—proceed only with the knowledge and participation of the deputies.

3. To the greatest extent possible, relieving the Council of People’s Commissars and the Council of Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies of trivial matters whose resolution should, in part—and predominantly—in be handled through departmental administration, while in other cases—namely, in urgent matters requiring immediate attention and those of exceptional importance—the deputies themselves should issue direct instructions.

4. To exercise close oversight to ensure that the executive sessions of the Council of Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies, and especially those of the Small Council of People’s Commissars, do not expand their scope beyond what is strictly necessary, nor complicate their work or place undue burdens upon the officials entrusted with these responsibilities.

The first page of V. I. Lenin’s manuscript “Resolution on the Work of Deputies (Deputies to the President of the Council of People’s Commissars and the Council of Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies).” – April 11, 1922.

RESOLUTION ON THE WORK OF DEPUTIES

These tasks did not permit bureaucratic overextension or hypertrophy of their functions; rather, they called for greater independence in work and heightened accountability on the part of each People’s Commissar and every individual institution.

5. To compel People’s Commissars and individually designated institutions to exercise independent and responsible governance within the limits of the powers granted to them and the duties incumbent upon them.

6. To ensure that, first and foremost, the responsibilities of members of collegial bodies and of key working committees—and subsequently those of all working committee members—are precisely and individually defined; to wage a relentless struggle against the pervasive vagueness and ambiguity surrounding the question of what is assigned to each individual, and against the resulting total lack of accountability.

7. To personally become acquainted with a certain number of working committee members—not only the highest-ranking officials, but equally the middle and lower ranks—by summoning them to his office and, whenever possible, by visiting individual Moscow institutions and traveling into the provinces, with the aim of assessing and selecting personnel, as well as genuinely improving the apparatus of the working committees.

8. To place those People’s Commissariats, their departments, and their institutions that, over a given period, have come to assume an exceptionally critical role under a state of heightened readiness, providing them with maximum support in terms of personnel, resources, and personal guidance from the deputies, and the like.
II. SPECIAL ISSUES RELATING TO THE WORK OF THE DEPUTIES

9. Approximately
/
the deputies should devote their efforts primarily to the economic People’s Commissariats, /
– and to the remaining departments.

10. In the near term, financial issues have risen to the forefront; the deputies must accord them the greatest attention.

11. Of particular urgency is the introduction of a bonus system, whereby employees in the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Trade, in cooperatives, and in other institutions engaged in commerce are rewarded according to the volume of turnover and the size of profits realized.

It is imperative to systematically study and develop measures that extend the bonus system to cover the entire remuneration of all employees in the public service generally.

12. All efforts to establish a separate People’s Commissariat for Internal Trade—or to merge this function into the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Trade or the Supreme Council of National Economy—should be discontinued. Instead, a special “Commission for Internal Trade” should be established under the Council of Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies, with a minimal secretariat attached and limited local organs: provincial economic councils.

13. It is of utmost importance to monitor the operations of state trading trusts, distinguishing those that are reasonably well managed from the majority that are poorly run—and to resolutely close the latter; to examine the actual role played by Communists on the boards of state trading trusts; and to identify those individuals who are truly accountable for managing affairs and for ensuring the successful conduct of business.

14. Each deputy should take responsibility for establishing one or two model departments or institutions within a given People’s Commissariat—developing standard staffing levels, testing these standards, and identifying the most effective methods for organizing work and overseeing its execution.
The practices of operation, the means of increasing productivity, and the methods of control developed in these few—but truly exemplary—institutions should then be gradually introduced into all public institutions.
Given the exceptional importance of this issue, and in view of the tenacious resistance mounted by the Soviet bureaucracy, which clings to outdated bureaucratic practices, a determined struggle is inevitable to create a small number of model institutions as a means of lifting up and scrutinizing the remaining institutions. In consultation with the relevant organizations (the Central Committee of the Union of Public Servants, the All‑Union Central Council of Trade Unions, the Institute of Labor, and others), and under the supervision of the deputies, all the best contemporary literature—

RESOLUTION ON THE WORK OF DEPUTIES
especially American and German works on labor organization and management—should be collected and published.

15. It is necessary to observe—at least initially, in very few institutions—how Communists are reassigned within public institutions, striving to ensure that Communists occupy positions—both at the very top and at the very bottom of the hierarchical ladder—that enable them to truly monitor the progress of work, to effectively combat bureaucracy and red tape, and to achieve immediate improvements in the conditions and alleviate the plight of those unfortunate citizens who are forced to deal with our utterly inadequate Soviet apparatus.
Special attention should be paid to Communists holding positions at the lower reaches of the hierarchy, for they are often more important in practice than those at the top.

16. Reports from provincial economic councils must be properly read—first, by members of the State Planning Commission and by staff of the Central Statistical Office and “Economic Life” 97—so that each reader can offer the briefest possible comments for publication or for their own institutions, and can provide the necessary timely guidance and conclusions; second, by a group of several dozen Communists—preferably drawn from among those not employed in the public service and capable of reading reports from a non‑departmental, but purely Communist, perspective.
A group led by Comrade Milyutin in Petrograd should be responsible for distributing reports from provincial economic councils for reading and for utilizing these reports in newspapers, journals, summary pamphlets, and the like.
We must relentlessly strive to gradually expand the range of economic reports that are required to be published by all economic institutions (including regional economic councils, state trading trusts, “mixed societies,” and the like), for without accustoming ever larger segments of the population to consulting such reports in libraries, there can be no real talk of transforming this semi‑Asian country into a cultured, socialist society.

17. The newspaper “Economic Life” must be transformed into a genuine organ of the Council of Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies—a true instrument of economic governance. Both deputies should read it regularly and wage a relentless struggle against the prevailing tendency among writers and working committee members to reduce this newspaper to the level of an ordinary “semi‑independent,” intelligentsia‑bourgeois organ of “opinions, views, and polemics”—without summarizing reports, without verifying the accuracy of their receipt, without conducting serious analyses of economic work in individual institutions, without offering rigorous critiques of both effective and ineffective institutions, of individuals, of working methods, and so forth.
The transformation of “Economic Life” into a genuine organ of economic governance, into a true instrument of socialist construction, will require years of struggle—but all the more reason to pursue this struggle with unwavering determination and systematic consistency.

18. The same applies to the Central Statistical Office. It must not remain the “academic” or “independent” body that it has been, by old bourgeois habit, for nine-tenths of its current existence; rather, it must become an organ of socialist construction—of verification, of control, of accounting for what the socialist state needs to know now, today, above all else. Resistance to these old habits will inevitably be fierce; all the more reason to fight with steadfast resolve. (I ask the deputies to review my correspondence on this topic with the editor of “Economic Life” and with the Central Statistical Office during the summer of 1921.)
III. THE METHOD OF WORK FOR THE DEPUTIES; THEIR APPARATUS

19. The deputies should free themselves as much as possible from petty tasks and from unnecessary meetings with People’s Commissars and members of collegial bodies—tasks that typically consume vast amounts of time and thereby deprive them of the opportunity to focus on examining actual work performance.

* See Collected Works, 5th ed., vol. 44, pp. 112–114, and Collected Works, 4th ed., vol. 33, pp. 9–14. Ed.

RESOLUTION ON THE WORK OF DEPUTIES

20. The deputies should, to the greatest extent possible, refrain from participating in commissions of various kinds.
21. The deputies should make every effort to close existing commissions—those that are superfluous and tend to reemerge very quickly after being closed, albeit under slightly different guises—and to prevent the formation of new ones.
22. In cases where commission-based work is unavoidable, the deputies should avoid personal involvement in such commissions as much as possible, limiting themselves, whenever feasible, to the final approval of their decisions—or to accelerating the work and directing the decisions, in accordance with established procedures, for approval.
23. The deputies’ apparatus consists, first and foremost, of the staff of the Administrative Departments of the Council of People’s Commissars and the Council of Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies, along with their assistants and secretaries. Beyond the absolutely necessary minimum—and only to the extent that it remains fully manageable (not overly large) under the deputies’ personal oversight—this apparatus must not be expanded under any circumstances. Second, the deputies assign specific tasks to individual members of the Small Council of People’s Commissars. Third, the main apparatus of the deputies should be the People’s Commissariat for Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection.
The deputies personally select their assistants and implementers from within this People’s Commissariat, training them in their work and carefully monitoring their performance—seeking, in particular, to broaden the participation of non‑Party workers and peasants in this work (a task that is exceedingly difficult, yet at the same time one without which the Soviet power is inevitably doomed to perish).
24. The deputies should strive to apply administrative sanctions more frequently than before, exercising their personal authority—to expedite the draft law on this subject, prepared by Comrade Tsyurupa—for instances of bureaucracy, red tape, failure to execute directives, carelessness, and the like. In cases involving more serious culpability, it is necessary to remove officials from their posts, to bring them to trial, and to stage demonstrative, high‑profile trials through the People’s Commissariat for Justice.

IV. ON THE UNITY OF WORK BETWEEN THE TWO DEPUTIES

25. To establish complete unity in the work of both deputies, they shall mutually exchange copies of the most important directives and shall systematically adopt the practice of stenographic recording of those directives, instructions, and the like that they issue orally during personal meetings (of course, in the briefest possible form and focusing only on the most crucial matters). The number of stenographers assigned to the Administrative Departments of the Council of People’s Commissars should be increased accordingly, so that throughout the deputies’ working hours, two stenographers are always on duty. If necessary, a pair of the finest dictaphones may be procured from abroad.
26. The same applies to the most important reports, whether written or oral.
27. In necessary and critical cases, the deputies shall convene meetings in order to achieve a unified understanding of tasks and actions, and to eliminate, to the greatest extent possible, any overlaps or contradictions in their work.
In the event of disagreement between the deputies, the matter shall be resolved by the Presidium of the Council of People’s Commissars; in the absence of the Presidium, the Politburo of the Central Committee or a comrade specially appointed by it shall decide.
V. THE DISTRIBUTION OF WORK BETWEEN THE DEPUTIES

28. For the coming months, until further notice, the following distribution of work between the deputies is established.
29. Comrade Tsyurupa presides over the Great Council of People’s Commissars (after two hours of meeting, the chairmanship is transferred to Comrade Rykov). The presence of a deputy who is not serving as chairman is mandatory at both the Great Council of People’s Commissars and the Council of Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies (in plenary session).
Comrade Tsyurupa signs for publication the resolutions of the Great Council of People’s Commissars and the telegraphic directives issued in its name, while also overseeing the commissions of the Great Council of People’s Commissars and the Small Council of People’s Commissars, as well as the work of the Small Council of People’s Commissars. He also closely supervises the Administration and Secretariat of the Great Council of People’s Commissars, while simultaneously ensuring the complete unity of this apparatus with the apparatus of the Council of Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies—preventing any division or inconsistency whatsoever.

RESOLUTION ON THE WORK OF DEPUTIES

30. Comrade Rykov presides over the plenary sessions of the Council of Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies, signs for publication the resolutions of the Council of Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies and its telegraphic directives, while closely overseeing the Administration and Secretariat of the Council of Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies (under the aforementioned condition of complete integration between this apparatus and the apparatus of the Great Council of People’s Commissars).
31. With regard to monitoring implementation, overseeing staff reductions, and improving the apparatus—as well as concerning certain minor, routine matters that do not require decision by the Great Council of People’s Commissars or the Council of Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies—the People’s Commissariats are divided between the two deputies as follows:
The following People’s Commissariats fall under the jurisdiction of Comrade Tsyurupa:
NKZem
NKPS
VSNKh
NKPochele
NKYust
NKVD
NKNats
NKProsvet
The following People’s Commissariats fall under the jurisdiction of Comrade Rykov:
NKF
NKVT
The Commission for Internal Trade
Centrosoyuz
NKTrud (and the All‑Union Central Council of Trade Unions, insofar as it pertains to this area)
NKSObes
NKProd
NKVoyn
NKIDel
NKZdrav
The Central Statistical Office
Regional Economic Councils
The Concession Committee
Gosplan
Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, V. Ulyanov (Lenin), PDU, 1922.
First published in 1928.

In the Eighth Lenin Collection

Printed from the manuscript