V. I. Lenin

Source: ru:PSS/v52;es:MT
Translated: machine translation (DeepSeek) from the Russian; AI-translated.

To the Secretary of the Administration for Property Evacuated from Poland, Comrade M. Sokolov

16/V.

Dear Comrade,

I have received and read your draft report for 18/V. 280 You write that I have "signed up." On the one hand, you say, I advocate the planting of state capitalism by leasing out forests, land, etc., and on the other hand, I (Lenin) "talk" about "the expropriation of the landlords."

This seems to you a contradiction.

You are mistaken. Expropriation in Russian means deprivation of property.

A lessee is not an owner. Hence, there is no contradiction.

The planting of capitalism (within limits and skilfully, as I repeatedly say in my pamphlet*) is possible without restoring property to the landlords. A lease is a contract for a term. Both property and control remain with us, with the workers' state.

"What fool of a lessee will spend money on model farming," you write, "if he is haunted by the thought of the possibility of expropriation..."

Expropriation is a fact, not a possibility. That is a big difference. Before the actual expropriation, not a single capitalist would have entered our service as a lessee. But now "they," the capitalists, have fought for three years, have spent hundreds of millions of gold rubles (their own and Anglo-French: and these are the richest people in the world) on the war against us. Now they are in distress abroad. What choice have they? Why should they not agree to a contract: for ten years you will get a decent income, otherwise... die abroad? Many will hesitate. If out of a hundred five agree to the experiment, that will not be bad.

You write:

"The initiative of the masses is possible only when we wipe off the face of the earth that abscess which is called the bureaucratic chief administrations and centres."

Although I have not been in the localities, I know this bureaucracy and all its harmfulness. Your mistake is to think that it can be destroyed at one stroke, "wiped off the face of the earth," like an "abscess."

That is a mistake. You can drive out a tsar, drive out the landlords, drive out the capitalists. We have done that. But you cannot "drive out" bureaucracy in a peasant country, you cannot "wipe it off the face of the earth." You can only reduce it by slow, stubborn effort.

To "throw off" the "bureaucratic abscess," as you express it elsewhere, is wrong in the very formulation of the question. It is a failure to understand the question. An abscess of this kind cannot be "thrown off." It can only be cured. Surgery in this case is absurd, impossible; only slow treatment—everything else is quackery or naivety.

You are precisely naive, excuse my frankness. But you yourself write about your youth.

It is naive to wave aside treatment, referring to the fact that you have tried to fight the bureaucrats two or three times and have been defeated. In the first place, I reply to this unsuccessful experience of yours—firstly, you must try not two or three times, but twenty or thirty times, repeat, begin anew.

Secondly, where is the proof that you fought correctly, skilfully? The bureaucrats are cunning, many of them are scoundrels, arch-swindlers. You cannot catch them with your bare hands. Did you fight correctly? Did you surround the "enemy" according to all the rules of military art? I do not know.

Your reference to Engels is pointless. 281 Did some "intellectual" suggest this reference to you? It is a pointless reference, if not worse than pointless. It smacks of doctrinairism. It looks like despair. But for us to despair is either ridiculous or shameful.

The fight against bureaucracy in a peasant and extremely exhausted country requires a long time, and this fight must be waged persistently, without losing heart at the first failure.

"Throw off" the "chief administrations"? Nonsense. What will you put in their place? You do not know that.

Do not throw them off, but clean them, cure them, cure and clean them ten and a hundred times. And do not lose heart.

If you read your report (I have absolutely no objection to that), please also read my letter to you.

I press your hand and ask you not to allow a "spirit of despondency" to take hold of you.

Lenin

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Written on May 16, 1921

First published on January 1, 1924, in the newspaper Pravda No. 1

Printed from the manuscript