V. I. Lenin

Source: ru:PSS/v54;es:MT
Translated: machine translation (DeepSeek) from the Russian; AI-translated.

Comrade Khinchuk:

I cannot receive the co-operative workers because I am ill. My speech, in which I speak about this illness, will be printed tomorrow.* As regards the co-operative workers, I am afraid they may have fictitiously inflated their liabilities when handing them over to you. I am passing your note to Gorbunov and Smolyaninov and ask you to send the final exact statement of assets and liabilities to them, so that they can let me know the total.

How are things going with the loan you were expecting from the foreign co-operatives when you left?

I shall expect your brief summaries on how the co-operative apparatus in Russia is developing (I have only the old figures: September—1 million, October—3, November—6 million gold rubles). Have you now got ten-day returns?

Have you exact information as to how many gubernia co-operative unions send you regular reports and how many do not? Do you make payment to co-operative workers depend on the volume of their turnover and on the success achieved, expressed in a reduction of the percentage of expenditure on our apparatus?

* This refers to the speech “The International and Internal Position of the Soviet Republic” (see present edition, Vol. 33, pp. 189-210).—Ed.

I ask you to answer these questions in the briefest form and to add what serious measures of verification the Board of the Central Union of Consumers’ Co-operative Societies is taking to ensure that our co-operative system is really a commercial, and not a bureaucratic, body. Tikhomirov’s letter, which I received recently and have answered,* aroused no little doubt in me on this score, and so did the attempt to publish a weekly newspaper, Co-operative Affairs.** Probably you have bureaucrats and intellectuals sitting in undeservedly high places, who are capable of playing with papers and playing at newspapers, but are incapable of trading.

Lenin

Dictated over the telephone

March 7, 1922