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Special pages :
Letter to Gleb Krzhizhanovsky, October 17, 1921
First published on April 15, 1930 in Pravda No. 104. Printed from the original.
Copy to Comrade Osinsky,
copy to Comrade Avanesov
for all CLD members, circulate for all to read
and sign upon reading
17/X.1921
Comrade Krzhizhanovsky:
I draw your attention to Comrade Rakovsky’s article, “The Famine and Maize”, in Pravda No. 231 (14.X.1921).
In the light of this article, I feel sure that the conclusion of the State Planning Commission’s agricultural section on maize (of 13.IX.1921, signed by Comrade Sereda) is inadequate.
The advantages of maize (and beans) appear to be proven in several respects. Since this is so, faster and more vigorous measures should be taken. Of especial importance is the fact that the seed requirement is between one-tenth and one-fifteenth of the normal quantity.
This appears to be the crucial consideration.
It should be decided right away that the total quantity of maize required for the full sowing of all the spring area throughout the Volga region should be purchased in good time for the sowing in the spring of 1922.
To attain this aim, this should be paralleled by:
1) elaboration of very precise and very circumstantially considered measures for the propaganda of maize and the teaching of peasants to grow maize with the meagre resources now available;
2) urgent discussion of whether practical ways and means can be found to make maize a part of the people’s diet, under the existing conditions in peasant farming, their habits and way of life (cf. page 35, the State Planning Commission’s memo).
I request an immediate discussion of these questions in the agricultural section and the presidium, making sure to collect every shade of opinion on maize.
Report to the CLD on Friday, 21.X.1921.[1]
V. Ulyanov (Lenin)
Chairman, CLD
First published in 1933 in Lenin Miscellany XXIII. Printed from the original.
17/X.
G. M.:
This is secret.
Read it and return this very day, tomorrow morning, at the latest.
The author[2] is partly right: I shall change the assignment to the State Planning Commission in the conclusion (assignment to the People’s Commissariat for Agriculture).
Please think about the way to co-ordinate and specify S.P.C. tasks and let me have your plan (draft decision on drawing a line of distinction between S.P.C. and the planning commissions) in writing.
With communist greetings,
Lenin
- ↑ The Gosplan (State Planning Commission) report on the raising of maize was on the CLD agenda for October 21, 1921, but was put off in order to have the People’s Commissariat for Agriculture also take part in deciding this question, in connection with the letter of October 17 from Deputy People’s Commissar for Agriculture, N. Osinsky, who objected to the Gosplan’s agricultural section submitting such important farming questions to the CLD on its own (see also this volume, Document 447).
- ↑ The author is N. Osinsky, Deputy People’s Commissar for Agriculture, who in his letter of October 17, in reply to Lenin’s letter (see this volume, Document 444), insisted on a legal settlement of the relations between the People’s Commissariat for Agriculture and Gosplan. He proposed that Gosplan’s role should be confined “only to a general co-ordination of plans submitted by the departments; Gosplan is not to work out any plans on its own, everything being done in the planning commissions of the Commissariats” (Central Party Archives of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the CPSU Central Committee).
In reply, G. M. Krzhizhanovsky wrote that N. Osinsky was right “in the sense that Gosplan’s work should have a follow-up character. But it is wrong to interpret this as meaning that the people at Gosplan should in some way engage in ‘summarising’, without having special sections which make use of some of the departmental specialists. I have already raised with all the sections the question of transforming and delimiting the work of primary planning organs and our own work” (ibid.), Krzhizhanovsky went on to set out a number of measures to improve the work of Gosplan.