Letter to Dmitry Kursky and Assignment to Nikolai Gorbunov, February 15, 1922

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Author(s) Lenin
Written 15 February 1922


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First published in 1945 in Lenin Miscellany XXXV. Printed from the original.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1976, Moscow, Volume 45, pages 470b-471a.
Keywords : Dmitry Kursky, Letter, Nikolai Gorbunov

Comrade Kursky:

I enclose Koblents’s reply to me.[1] After reading, please, return to N. P. Gorbunov:

1) I very strongly suspect that Koblents is poor, and that the whole of this department is poor too.

Koblents has clearly “forgotten” that an enterprise leased from the Soviet power is still a Soviet enterprise;

2) ——confused the question about subsequent or preliminary audit with the question of whether or not it is liable to auditing at all;

3) he has apparently “forgotten” that the rights of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection are not narrower than the State Control’s old powers (Collection of Statutes, 1920, No. 16); he has forgotten many other things as well.

Conclusion: Koblents’s opinion must be checked up, and if a careful study shows that Koblents has told a lie, he should be replaced by a more solid lawyer.

Let me know whom you will appoint as responsible for this check-up.

———If our laws are “contradictory” (of which there is no doubt), what are the People’s Commissariat for Justice and the Legislative Proposals Department for?

What then is being done towards codification?—towards removal of contradictions?

In particular, this is just the time for urgently working out a clear and precise law on the extension of the W.P.I.’s powers to audit and inquire to all manner of establishments and enterprises (private, co-operative, concession, etc.).

Let me know who will be given this assignment.

With communist greetings,

Lenin

Comrade N. P. Gorbunov:

Please read this and make a note of it for yourself to keep an eye on execution.

Have this typed and sent to Comrade Kursky.[2]

  1. ↑ See Collected Works, Fifth [Russian) Edition, Vol. 54, Supplement, Document 16.—Ed.
  2. ↑ The following day, February 16, 1922, D. I. Kursky replied to Lenin’s letter, informing him that be had instructed V. I. Yakhontov, member of the Collegium of the People’s Commissariat for Justice and head of the Codification Department, to verify I. G. Koblents’s conclusion. Kursky wrote about the draft Statute of Obligations, Criminal Code, etc., which had been submitted for approval by the CPC, and about the elaboration of a number of laws at the People’s Commissariats for Agriculture, Labour, and Justice. He admitted that there were contradictions in the existing laws. Sharing Lenin’s view on the “need to guarantee the state full auditing and control”, Kursky wrote that he would “consider highly useful a CC directive in this respect for the Narrow CPC..” (underlined by Lenin) (see Lenin Miscellany XXXV, p. 326).
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