Date: 1922
Source: ru:PSS/v45

THESES OF THE LETTER “ON ‘DOUBLE’ SUBORDINATION AND LEGALITY”* (a) (b) Double Subordination and Oversight of Legality.
Against bureaucratic centralism? — in favor of the necessary autonomy of local bodies? — against an arrogant attitude toward provincial executive committee officials?
Is there arrogance in the view that legality cannot be “Kaluga-style” or “Kazan-style”?
Double subordination is appropriate where one must learn to account for differences:
agriculture in Kaluga versus Kazan, industry, and all forms of administration. There must be a single, unified legality. Otherwise, there can be neither cultural sophistication nor political literacy.
Unified legality—local administration and local courts. The Procurator’s Office does not administer; it does not decide anything.
It oversees legality: it neither suspends the decisions of the Provincial Executive Committee nor adjudicates on their expediency (as the Rabkrin did), but rather safeguards a single, overarching legality.
Therefore, the greatest fundamental error—and a fundamentally flawed application of the principle of double subordination—is precisely this.
Then there is the question of local influences.
A sea of lawlessness and the pernicious influence of local interests. Take, for example, party purges: can such practices be denied, or should they be seen as an expression of arrogance toward provincial executive committee officials?

* See this volume, pp. 197–201. Ed.
** In the manuscript, the first six paragraphs have been crossed out. Ed.

Ten—or even a hundred—party members capable of combating local influence? |= (??) Organizational Bureau + Political Bureau + Central Control Commission
The Center = the Prosecutor General + the Supreme Tribunal + the People’s Commissariat of Justice + (??)
? ?? = local bureaucracy, steeped in local influences—the worst possible intermediary between the working people and the state || legality and cultural refinement must be unified at a minimum, not “Kaluga-style.”
Written in May, no later than May 20, 1922.
First published in 1959.

In Lenin Collection XXXVI

Printed from the manuscript

* – Summa summarum – the ultimate conclusion. Ed.