Materials to the Article “How We Should Reorganise the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection” [1]

I

Plan of an Article “What Should We Do with the W.P.I.?”

1. — Our state apparatus as a whole is most closely tied, most imbued
with the old spirit.

In this way we may better renovate it.

2. — Such a type of apparatus as that directly connected with the Central
Committee makes for the greatest mobility.

3. — It enjoys greatest authority.

4. — Won’t that make for too many C.C. members?

5. The conference nature of the C.C. plenums has already grown out of
our previous Party building.

6. — A ruling is possible limiting attendance of C.C. members at
meetings of higher government bodies (the C.P.C., C.L.D., All-Russia
Central Executive Committee, etc.).

7. — It is possible to arrange their taking turns in attending these
meetings.

8. — It is possible to arrange their taking turns at the meetings of
the Board of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection.

9. — Possible objections to this plan: too many inspectors, too much
supervision, too many chiefs having the right to demand an immediate reply
and tearing the staff away from their direct duties, etc.

10. — Answer: we propose an unusual type of personnel for the W.P.I.

11. — How account for the fact that the Commissariat for Foreign
Affairs has a better type of staff? And what are the conditions for making
a similar renovated apparatus out of the W.P.I.?

12. — The W.P.I. should start right away organising the work on new
lines, guided by five years experience.

13. — New organisation of work on the part of the C.C. Secretariat
(training new members of the C.C. in all the details of administration).

14. — Better organisation of Politbureau meetings will come about in
the course of the work itself.

15. — Important gain from increasing the number of
C.C. members—lessening of the personal and casual element in its
decisions, etc.

_DICTATED_ Dictated not later than January 9, 1923

_FIRST_PUBLISHED_ First published in 1959 in Lenin Miscellany XXXVI

_PRINTED_FROM_ Printed from the secretary’s notes (typewritten copy)

2

What Should We Do With the W.P.I.?

Without a doubt, the W.P.I. is an enormous difficulty for
us. So far nothing has come of it, and the question of its organisation and
even its expediency remains a question.

I think that those who doubt whether there is any need for it are
wrong. At the same time, however, I do not deny that the problem presented
by our state machinery and the task of improving it is very difficult and
far from being solved.

With the exception of the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs,
our state apparatus is largely a survival of the past, and least of all
affected by any drastic change. It has only been slightly touched up on the
surface. In all other respects, in order to get it to work properly, it has
always been necessary for the workers’ and peasants’ state—a state built
entirely on new lines—to concentrate members of the Party in it
throughout the hierarchical framework.

It is worth remembering how we acted in the critical moments of the
civil war, how we concentrated our best Party forces in the Red Army, how
we resorted to the mobilisation of the advanced workers from among the
Party ranks—in order to confirm what has been said.

And so, I believe, as a result of all our attempts to reorganise the
Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection there emerges the conclusion that we have
not made one more attempt. Namely, we have not tried to put this matter
into the hands of our workers and peasants, by placing them at the head of
our Party as members of the Central Committee.

I visualise this reform of the W.P.I. in the following manner: some 50
to 75 workers and peasants, fully tried and trusted as to conscientiousness
and devotion, are elected to the C.C. of the Party in addition to the other
C.C. members. At the same time, the staff of the W.P.I. should be reduced
at last (at long last!) to several hundred, consisting, on the one hand,
of persons with most experience in W.P.I. work in general, i.e., persons
who are most familiar with the general supervision of our apparatus of
highly skilled specialists and who have a knowledge of both our apparatus and of the principles and problems of office work
organisation, methods of verification and investigation—and, on the other
hand, of persons of the purely secretarial, auxiliary staff.

The task of the new members of the C.C., who have fully equal rights
with the other members of the C.C., is, by long hard work, to make a study
of and improve our state machinery. All the other members of the
W.P.I. staff are to help them in this, some as persons most familiar with
this machinery and with the work of the W.P.I., others as employees of the
secretarial type.

At the same time the People’s Commissariat of Workers’ and Peasants’
Inspection could remain the same commissariat it has been up till now. The
new members of the C.C. could be considered temporarily attached to it. The
People’s Commissar of the W.P.I. could retain his present rank, position
and rights along with the members of his Board.

What do we stand to gain from such an organisation? First of all, we
would drop once and for all the practice of new reorganisations undertaken
on the basis of an inadequate study of our apparatus. Secondly, we would
enhance the authority of this commissariat both by means of enlisting
members of the C.C. to it and by reducing its staff to a few hundred
members. From the present position, under which the members of the People’s
Commissariat of the W.P.I. as a general rule live on sops from the
inspected institutions, we would pass immediately to a position under which
the maximum independence of the W.P.I. employees would be guaranteed either
by a very high salary (this could be achieved by reducing the number of the
staff to a few hundred very highly skilled and tested top-level workers),
or by those assistants of a purely secretarial type, who would be under the
constant control and supervision of both the above-mentioned members of the
C.C. and of the few specialists left by us after careful screening of the
commissariat’s staff.

The new members of the Central Committee would be assigned the task of
making a closer and more careful study of our machinery of state in all its
ramifications, including, incidentally, the state trusts.

This job cannot be done quickly. No definite time limit, therefore,
would be set for them. On the other hand, they could reckon on several
years work by alternating members of the C.C. working on the same
assignment, i.e., by a decision of a Party congress we would guarantee to
members of the C.C. the possibility of working at this job for several
years and then returning to their former jobs.

Lenin

January 9, 1923

Taken down by M. V.

What Should We Do With the W.P.I.?

(continuation)

I foresee that this plan will evoke no end of objections,
most of which will be prompted by the vicious howl of the worst of the old
elements in our state apparatus, who have remained really old, that is,
pre-revolutionary. They will say that this will lead to nothing but
complete chaos in the work, that the C.C. members, not knowing what to do,
will loiter about the commissariats and government offices, interfering
everywhere with the work, demanding explanations, etc., etc.

I think that the nature of these objections clearly betrays the source
they come from, and are hardly worth answering. Obviously, if we had in
mind an ordinary type of staff, some of these objections might be
warranted. But the thing is, we do not have in mind the usual type of staff
for this commissariat, but single out for it the best workers, who, on
verification by the Party congress, deserve to be elected to the C.C. In
this way, I believe, we guarantee that the staff of the People’s
Commissariat of the W.P.I. will be as good as the best of our
commissariats, namely, the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs. How
do we account for the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs having the best
staff of employees? In the first place, because diplomats of the old stamp
could not remain there to any noticeable degree; secondly, because we
selected people there anew, selected them by entirely new standards, by
their fitness for the new tasks; thirdly, because there, in the Foreign
Commissariat, we do not have, as in other commissariats, that plethora of haphazardly selected employees who, practically speaking, have inherited
all the old qualities of officialdom; and fourthly, because the Foreign
Commissariat is working under the direct guidance of our Central
Committee. This, as a matter of fact, is the only one of our commissariats
that has been fully renovated and that is really working for the workers’
and peasants’ government and in the spirit of that government, and not
merely giving the impression of working for it, while actually, in the
main, working against it or in the wrong spirit.

Now what conditions are we faced with in our attempt to make a truly
renovated apparatus out of the W.P.I.? The first condition—conscientiousness, will be fully ensured by selection; the
second condition is the high qualities of the staff members as regards
their devotion to the cause and their abilities; the third condition is
their closeness to the highest Party body and their equal rights with those
who lead our Party, and, through it, the whole of our state apparatus.

It may be said that no amount of conscientiousness or Party
authoritativeness can make up for what, in this case, is the most important
thing, namely, knowledge of one’s business, knowledge of our state
apparatus, and knowledge of the way it should be remodelled.

My reply to this is that one of the essential conditions of my proposal
is that we are not to expect quick results in the work of the new
commissariat and anticipate that this work will go on for many years. The
question then boils down to organising the work of the new commissariat.

And here I feel justified in presuming that both our Party workers and
the people now in charge of the W.P.I. have accumulated sufficient
experience, sufficient knowledge, sufficient ability and other qualities to
properly organise the training of the new C.C. members, and a practical
training at that, i.e., by combining their familiarisation with all the
details of our state apparatus with a study of what modern science has
achieved in the bourgeois states as regards efficient organisation of every
kind of staff work.

Lenin

January 13, 1923

Taken down by L. F.

What Should We Do With the W.P.I.?

(continuation 2)

I assume that it goes without saying that the W.P.I. will
start at once, on the basis of five years experience, organising the work
on new lines; that it will divide the new workers into a number of groups
and assign the work among these groups systematically; that it will divide
these groups into: periodically employed people making a practical study of
foreign experience; into people engaged in theoretical work and studying
the results of modern science in the field of organisation of labour
generally and managerial work in particular. It will arrange for all the
W.P.I. workers to go through the jobs assigned to them, systematically
working from the bottom upwards, performing varied functions in varied
fields of administration, in varied localities, in varied conditions of
work as regards nationalities, and so on.

In short, I assume that the comrades in the W.P.I. have learned
something during these five years and will be able to apply the knowledge
they have gained to the new organisation of the commissariat. Moreover, it
should not be forgotten that we have, I believe, three scientific
institutions carrying out research into problems of work organisation (the
Central Institute of Labour, a special group under the W.P.I. and a group
under the Military Commissariat). A meeting of these three groups was held recently, [2] and it is to be hoped that their work will now proceed in
a more efficient manner and in a better team spirit than heretofore.

What is the new work organisation that I propose on the part of the
Secretariat of our C.C.? Naturally, the increased number of C.C. members
will require a new organisation of the work. I must point out, however,
that actually we have already passed to a form of organisation of our
C.C. plenums after the type of highest conferences. The thing now is to
organise the training of these new C.C. members in all Central Committee
work and familiarise them with the work of the leading state
institutions. If we are late with this, we shall not be fulfilling one of
our main duties,, namely, that of taking advantage of our being in power in
order

to teach the best elements of the working people all the details of
administration. Such measures as making better arrangements for the
meetings of our Politbureau, holding them twice a week and reducing the
length of sittings, better preparation of all the documents for these
meetings and arranging for these documents to be at the disposal of all the
members of the C.C. in good time. These measures now follow from the entire
course of the work and are essential, so much so that any kind of objection
to this is hardly conceivable. Naturally, this will call for an increase in
expenditure on secretarial type personnel, but to grudge the money for
these expenses would be most unwise.

Besides, frankly speaking, an important advantage in increasing the
number of C.C. members I consider to be the diminished chances of a
personal, incidental element being introduced in its decisions; these
decisions will be better prepared, the endorsements made at such meetings
will be more thoroughly verified, and as a result there will be greater
stability in our C.C., both as regards the continuity of its work and its
power to resist splits that might arise from insufficient contact of this
body with the masses.

Lenin

January 13, 1923