## NOTES ON THE REPORT OF N. N. KRESTINSKII

Source: PSS vol. 53

AND INSTRUCTIONS TO N. P. GORBUNOV

Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars

... In the course of fulfilling the obligations placed upon central and local financial organs, one encounters in recent times extraordinarily unfavorable obstacles, and chiefly the fact of complete disregard by the executive organs of Soviet power of the Constitution's indications concerning the drafting of budgets and the conduct of expenditures in accordance with them, which exerts an extremely harmful influence on the general state of the budget and introduces exceptional disruptions into the system of monetary circulation.

To illustrate, it will suffice to mention here the following circumstances: 1) in certain districts, payment to workers is made not according to tariff rates, but according to free market prices, and sometimes reaches 700 thousand rubles per person per day (Volga region, western and eastern provinces); 2) artists and workers in Soviet theaters are remunerated not according to tariff scales, but with supplements amounting to many hundreds of percent of the latter (while according to the budget of the Commissariat of Enlightenment, the expenditure for the maintenance of

NB

—an outrage!!

theaters is calculated at 29 billion, and for higher educational institutions at 17 billion; 3) purchases by Soviet institutions and enterprises of items they require on the free market and, of course, at the prices of the latter have become commonplace, as if it had become the established rule...

How did they "master" this without the NCF?

The nearest confirmation of the unsystematic demands for money tokens by cashier institutions is provided by the practice that has been adopted even in Moscow by Soviet institutions, according to which the organs of the Moscow Soviet strive to have the Moscow financial department dispose of monetary tokens for them at the rate of 3 billion rubles per day, i.e., 75 billion per month, whereas according to the data of the budget department and the Central Cashier of the NCF, credits have been opened to the Moscow financial department up to now only in the amount of 188 billion rubles, i.e., on average no more than 27-30 billion rubles per month...

Comrade Gorbunov! Send such a memorandum from me: NCF + NRKI + Chairman of the Small SNK.

I instruct the People's Commissars of Finance and of Workers' and Peasants' Inspection (or their deputies) to immediately convene a meeting with the participation of the Chairman of the Moscow SNK and the manager of affairs of the SNK, Gorbunov, for the purpose of drafting and submitting within a week's time to the SNK draft decrees for combating the violations of law indicated herein. I draw the attention of the Workers' and Peasants' Inspection to this oversight.

How could such outrages as those indicated in this memorandum have been tolerated until now? in particular, the overspending by the Commissariat of Enlightenment on theaters?

Chairman of the SNK, Lenin

2/IX.

Comrade Gorbunov! See to the execution of this within the deadline with precision. If you wish, replace yourself with Smolyyaninov or keep the meeting to three persons.

Lenin

2/IX.

Published for the first time from the manuscript

TO N. P. GORBUNOV. NO LATER THAN 2 SEPTEMBER 1921

Written 2 September 1921

First published incompletely in 1928 in Lenin Sbornik VIII

Published in full here