Date: 1922
Source: ru:PSS/v54

Source: PSS vol. 54

POLITICAL BUREAU OF THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE OF THE RCP(b) ON THE SURVEY

COMMISSARIAT FOR FOREIGN TRADE

I propose that the Political Bureau adopt the following resolution:

1) A report shall be prepared.

2) Unshlicht shall be appointed as the rapporteur.

3) The report should be crafted in such a way that its conclusions form the basis for the Political Bureau’s decisions, drawn in light of the report’s findings.

4) The confidential section of the report shall be presented at a secret session of the Bureau.

23/VIII. Lenin

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Written on August 23, 1921.

First published here, based on the manuscript.

Dear Comrade Varga! My comments are attached herewith. Should you deem it necessary, we can still discuss this further over the telephone.

With warm regards! Lenin

31/8

Proposed amendments or theses to Comrade E. Varga’s draft on the organization of the Information Institute

1. The Institute must enjoy absolute and complete legality—both under Berlin or Vienna conditions and across all of Western Europe, as well as in England and America.

2. The Institute’s headquarters should be located in Berlin, Vienna, Copenhagen, or Christiania.

3. No more than 20% of the Institute’s working time and publications should be devoted to economic and social issues (with 20% allocated to each category). The remaining 80% should be dedicated to political matters.

4. With regard to the political component, the Institute’s sole task is to gather objective data on those issues that are lawful and may be discussed openly.

5. The Institute must remain entirely independent of individual Communist Parties.

6. The Institute’s official name should be roughly as follows: Institute for the Study of Forms of Social Movement.

7. Fundamental directives shall be issued to the Institute’s director—or, at most, to three directors.

8. Based on these oral, principled directives, the director must develop a detailed, fully legal set of instructions and submit them here in Moscow for final approval by the Executive Committee of the Communist International.

9. Reports shall be submitted weekly, or twice a week. Economic and social appendices should be issued monthly, or once every three months.

10. The Institute must operate entirely independently of Russian embassies.

11. The Institute should begin on a modest scale. For German-speaking countries, the Scandinavian nations, and the Slavic states, the primary language of operation should be German.

The expansion of the Institute’s activities into Anglo-Saxon and Romance-speaking countries shall proceed only on the basis of special agreements with representatives from each of these regional groups—agreements to be finalized here in Moscow.

12. The Institute’s reports—or, better yet, its publications or correspondence—must be financed by subscribers (newspapers, libraries, and the like).

The overarching principle should be this: organize the Institute and conduct its work in such a way that all workers’ newspapers, regardless of their ideological orientation, are compelled to subscribe to the Institute’s publications and pay for them.

If this does not occur, it will serve as clear evidence that the Institute is utterly worthless.

13. As a preliminary draft for the Institute’s guidelines, Comrade Varga’s draft no. 752 should be adopted. In particular, two fundamental amendments are required to this draft: first, §3—amended upward;

second, a far more detailed elaboration of the political section.

Some remarks regarding point 2:
(Appendix B.) §§3 and 4: Correspondence from the factories?
+ Should funds be collected directly by the workers themselves?
+ Questions pertaining to the trade union movement must be developed—with particular emphasis—from a political perspective. The conquest of the trade unions constitutes one of the most crucial political issues.
+ Workers’ cooperatives: the same applies here (to Part II, b).
+ All transitional political formations—such as the worker-farmer parties in the United States—are especially important.
+ Leaflets? Distribution? Outreach?
+ What about the attitude toward the war of 1914–1918? This is of utmost importance.

Part II, §a: “Revolutionary” (??) workers’ parties, such as the KPRG.

The designation is inaccurate; these parties are not revolutionary. It would be more appropriate to describe them as semi-anarchist, anarchistically inclined, or closely aligned with anarchist principles.

It should also be noted: the global schism within anarchism over questions of patriotism versus internationalism—those who support the Soviet system, and those who oppose it.

(§b) — Parties of the Second and 2½ Internationals: these should be examined in far greater detail.
+ Their stance toward their own colonies—and toward imperialism in practical politics—should be explored in much, much greater depth.
+ All pacifist and petty-bourgeois democratic groups and tendencies—these too must be examined in far greater detail.

And so on.

31/8/1921. Lenin

First published here, based on the manuscript.
Translation from German