Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

730

LETTER TO J. V. STALIN AND M. I. FRUMKIN AND ASSIGNMENT TO SECRETARY

Written: Written on May 15, 1922
Published: First published in 1959 in Lenin Miscellany XXXVI. Printed from the original.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1976, Moscow, Volume 45, pages 549^b-550^a.
Translated: Yuri Sdobnikov
Transcription\Markup: R. Cymbala
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Comrades Stalin and Frumkin:

I think that we should issue an official banon all talks and conversations and Commissions, etc., on weakening the foreign trade monopoly.

I do not agree with Frumkin that state trade will always be beaten. Throughout the world it is the department stores that beat everyone else. Yet, in what way are they better than state trade?

There is need systematically to go over to bonusesfor employees for turnover and profit. Unless this is done the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Trade (and all of us) will be a flop. Frumkin does not think about this, and that is his fault.

15/V. Lenin

Send this confidentially to Stalin and Frumkin, requesting them to return it with a couple of words of comment. See that it is returned as soon as possible (2–3 days).^[1]

15/V. Lenin

Notes

[1] This letter and also the draft decision of the Politbureau of the R.C.P.(B.) C.C. confirming the foreign trade monopoly (see present edition, Vol. 42, p. 419) were written in connection with Lenin’s receipt on May 15, 1922, of material from N. N. Krestinsky, R.S.F.S.R. Plenipotentiary Representative in Germany, testifying to the negative effect on business negotiations with foreign capitalists exercised by the internal Party differences over the foreign trade monopoly question.

Deputy People’s Commissar for Foreign Trade, M. I. Frumkin, in a letter of May 10, 1922, proposed that wholesale trade in four or five products should be left in the hands of the state (People’s Commissariat for Foreign Trade) on the basis of a firm monopoly, with all the other products freely exported by the mixed companies which were to set aside a part of their profits for the state, without it making any capital outlays. Frumkin argued that state trade was being carried on at a loss, and that under free competition it would be beaten by private trade.

Under the text of Lenin’s letter, there is Stalin’s reply of May 17, 1922. While not objecting to a formal ban on steps towards a relaxation of the foreign trade monopoly “at the present stage,” he added that nevertheless “a relaxation is becoming inevitable.”

On May 22, the Politbureau adopted Lenin’s draft decision confirming the foreign trade monopoly.