PROJECT OF DIRECTIVES FROM THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE OF THE RCP(b) FOR THE SOVIET DELEGATION TO THE GENOA CONFERENCE
I submit the following draft directives from the Central Committee:
While not endorsing a specific list of experts, the Central Committee calls upon the candidates nominated to it to submit, within one week, a concise outline of their program and tactics—covering those issues that fall within the expert’s designated area of competence—for the entire Genoa Conference. All People’s Commissars are required to provide, within two days, written endorsements and guarantees for their respective expert candidates. Should these experts bring discredit upon themselves in Europe, both they and the People’s Commissars shall bear joint responsibility.
In further development and supplementation of the directives concerning the Genoa Conference, I propose the following:

1. Without prejudging the form or timing of our delegation’s appropriate interventions, the Central Committee unequivocally regards it as the delegation’s solemn duty to elaborate a comprehensive, independent, and coherent program addressing all fundamental questions.

2. This program must be bourgeois–pacifist in character, with a timely and clear reservation on the part of our delegation: we do not present here what we regard as the sole, fully consistent communist program (in brief: such-and-such a program), for we seek instead to offer to the attention of the other delegations—those standing on fundamentally different positions—a series of palliative measures and reformist-type initiatives that have already been proposed piecemeal in England and other capitalist countries by individuals who,

PROJECT OF DIRECTIVES FROM THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE OF THE RCP(b)
share bourgeois outlooks. Under certain conditions, this program of palliatives might nonetheless alleviate the dire circumstances of our time—though a definitive exit from these conditions can only be secured through a complete rupture with all the foundations of capitalist property.

3. A tentative list of the principal items comprising this program includes:
(1) the cancellation of all debts; (2) the application, to all colonies and dependent countries and nations, of an “Irish” solution;
(3) a radical revision of the Treaty of Versailles; (4) the provision of concessional loans to those countries most devastated by war—countries that are, at the same time, weakest in terms of their capacity to rise up independently and yet are of paramount importance to the global economy as prospective suppliers of vast quantities of food and raw materials;
(5) the establishment of a unified international gold standard for the monetary systems of various countries, along with measures to introduce this standard;
(6) an agreement among several countries on measures to combat inflation and currency devaluation—listing some of these measures;
(7) an agreement among several countries on measures to address the fuel crisis and to promote the most rational and economical utilization of energy resources, based on a unified, systematic electrification effort;
(8) the same, applied to the most pressing measures—those aimed at securing the supply of raw materials and food—concerning the reorganization and improvement of international transport.
And so on.
4. Such a program must be elaborated in public speeches; where this proves impossible, it should be printed in three to four European languages and distributed to delegates and the press—albeit in a condensed form. (It must, in any case, be published.)

5. Only individuals capable of developing, substantiating, and defending—whether in whole or in part—such a program should be appointed as experts. These experts must publish their own programs and plans for Europe, bearing their personal signatures. ((The echoes of such a program will resound in the press of the Third International: “This attempt to ‘persuade’ is not harmful—but nearly useless, for what is truly needed is revolution”; and in the press of the Second and Second-and-a-Half Internationals: let us see what they have to say.))
Written on February 6, 1922.
First published, in incomplete form, on April 24, 1962, in Pravda, No. 114.

Published in full for the first time, from the manuscript.