1. February 1922
To Comrade Molotov, for the Members of the Politburo
I propose that the following directive be approved for the Deputy Chairman and all members of the Genoa delegation:
1. All members of the delegation must prepare, in general terms, for all political and financial issues that are currently on the agenda—or may arise—during the conference. In addition, each member of the delegation should devote special, highly detailed, and thorough preparation to one of the most critical diplomatic questions and one of the most crucial financial issues.
Chicherin and Litvinov are tasked with drafting a distribution of these key issues among all members of the delegation (with the exception of those who are ill, such as Rudzutak and others).
2. By the meeting scheduled for February 22 (with the Politburo of the Central Committee), each member of the delegation must prepare the briefest possible summary—no more than 2–3 pages, written in a telegraphic style—of their own programmatic views and policies on all major issues, both diplomatic and financial.
3. Under the joint responsibility of Chicherin and Litvinov, all relevant literature in various languages must be collected and distributed to the members of the delegation well in advance; likewise, a systematic compendium of documents in Russian should be compiled.
4. Given the particular importance and extreme complexity of financial matters, Chicherin and Litvinov, in consultation with the People’s Commissariat for Finance, Gosplan, and A. D. Tsyu—

PROJECT OF DIRECTIVES FOR THE DEPUTY CHAIRMAN
a group of financial experts should be identified, along with a clear plan for allocating tasks among them; the deadline is one week.
5. All members of the delegation must have an excellent grasp of Keynes’s book “The Economic Consequences of the Peace,” as well as similar bourgeois and bourgeois-pacifist works—and excerpts from such works (for example, Lansing’s analysis of the “imperialist” character of the war and peace of 1918, and the like). Preparation should proceed as follows: in speeches and statements, briefly present the communist viewpoint, framing this exposition in such a way that—even though one is a communist and holds certain communist convictions—one nevertheless seeks, for the sake of the given audience, to cite not communists but rather to raise the question of the necessity to annul all debts, and so forth, from a bourgeois perspective (see points 6 and 7).
6. The total number of speeches and statements delivered by our delegates at the conference must be carefully calculated in advance, so that, regardless of how the conference unfolds or ends—whether it collapses within the shortest possible time, which we will of course strive to prevent—the final outcome will be a concise yet clear exposition of the entire body of communist viewpoints (on questions of international relations and economics) and a detailed presentation of the bourgeois and bourgeois-pacifist perspectives on the irreconcilable contradictions inherent in the imperialist world (both MIPA and the world itself).
7. It is highly probable—indeed, almost certain—that all the bourgeois delegates at the conference will immediately form a tacit but tightly knit bloc aimed at launching attacks against us, both over the issue of Georgia and over the usual accusations leveled by petty-bourgeois and big-bourgeois diplomacy and democracy. We must prepare for this in advance and, above all, make the first move to go on the offensive (in addition to our primary task of dividing the various nations among ourselves and sowing discord among them). The initial offensive should be carried out largely in a veiled manner, expressed—for instance—as “hints” (or as bourgeois quotations drawn from relevant works) concerning the most painful and shameful aspects of imperialist relations (Korea; Amritsar; the public flogging of revolutionaries in India; Lloyd George’s speech in Cannes denouncing Brieux as a “murderer,” and so on, and so forth).

8. In view of the repeatedly demonstrated tendency of our specialists—and especially of the Mensheviks—to consistently overestimate us (and often succeed in doing so), turning foreign missions into mere vacations and into tools for strengthening White Guard connections, the Central Committee proposes limiting the delegation to an absolute minimum of the most reliable experts, ensuring that each expert receives written guarantees from both the appropriate People’s Commissar and several leading communists. The number of experts must never exceed 45. The list of experts and the full composition of the delegation should be submitted to the Central Committee for approval within one and a half weeks. Comrades Litvinov, Ioffe, and Chicherin bear personal responsibility for this section. They are also responsible for selecting the administrative head, who must ensure that no night work or other such outrages take place.
To the draft of the directives’ theses for the Genoa delegation, I propose the following addition:
9. Our delegates must cite Article 1 of the Cannes Agreements in their speeches and statements with particular frequency—first, by quoting it exclusively in the version found in the Petit Parisien, using the phrase “the system of property,” rather than simply “the system”; second, by interpreting these words and this article in the most widely disseminated manner—namely, as if the article acknowledged the inevitability of replacing the capitalist system of property with a communist system of property, and as if the only remaining point of contention “between us” now concerns the timing of this transition and the method of that transition—whether to follow the Russian method of 1917–1920, or to adopt Lloyd George’s approach of “cut‑down revolutions,” such as the Irish model of 1921 or the Egyptian model of 1922, 162.
Lenin
First published from the manuscript