Letter to Moisei Frumkin and Ivan Radchenko, March 21, 1922

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See also this volume, Document 729.

21/III.1922.

Comrades Frumkin and Radchenko:

In a talk with me yesterday, Comrade Krasin expressed the fear that both of you are freetraders, which is why the future of the foreign-trade monopoly is being predetermined in a negative sense. I protested most vigorously; I referred to the fact that both of you are old Party men, tried and tested in every way, and that there was not the slightest ground for assuming that an absolutely precise directive from the C.C. Politbureau (which confirmed the theses recognising the foreign-trade monopoly) could be unfulfilled by you. In addition, I expressed great doubt about Comrade Frumkin being a “freetrader”. If Comrade Radchenko had earlier spoken out (something I, too, had heard from him) in the sense that the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Trade could “not cope” with the monopoly, what he had in mind, first, was the unsatisfactory apparatus of the P.C.F.T., which is the very thing we are now going to improve, and, second, apparently, the “absolute” monopoly of foreign trade, now substituted by a liberal monopoly, a monopoly unconditionally and in any case.

I consider it my duty to inform you about that talk with Krasin. Write me a couple of words. I hope that on the basis of “mixed societies”, if we all, you especially, see to it that there are no “compuppets”, communist puppets, up there on top for the sake of appearances, while specialists, swindlers, etc., handle all the business—that on this basis we shall restructure the whole economy of trade and restructure it precisely in the way necessary to ensure socialist construction.

With communist greetings,
Lenin