Written: Written later than April 5, 1921
Published:
First published in Trud No. 120, May 29, 1924.
Printed from the original.
Source:
Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
[1976],
Moscow,
Volume 35,
pages 480-481.
Translated: Andrew Rothstein
Transcription\Markup:
R. Cymbala
Public Domain:
Lenin Internet Archive.
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• README
Its main defect: too much about electrification, too little about current economic plans.
The main emphasis is not laid where it should be.
When I had before me the communist “wiseheads” who had not read the book The Electrification Plan[4] and had not understood its importance and were chattering and writing nonsense about the plan in general, I had to push their noses into this book, because there is no other serious plan and there cannot be.[1]
If I had before me the people who wrote that book, I should push their noses not into the book but away from it—into the problems of current economic plans.
Get down to those problems now, Messrs. Professors! Your electrification is in alien Ehren.[2] Honour to it indeed. You’ve written the first edition. We’ll make improvements and publish a second. The specialists in such-and-such a subcommission will write a dozen decrees and resolutions on teaching electricity and the electrification plan, and so forth. We shall endorse them.
But the general slate planning commission should now busy itself not with this, but immediately, with all its strength, set about the current economic plans.
Fuel today. For 1921. Now, this spring.
V. I. Lenin.
1921
The gathering of refuse, of scrap, of dead materials. Making use of them for the purpose of exchange for grain.
And the like.
This is what “their” noses have to be pushed into. This
is what they should be set to work at. Now. Today.
1–2 subcommissions on electrification.
9–8 subcommissions on current economic plans.
That is how the forces should be allocated for the
year 1921.
Yours,
Lenin
[1] See present edition, Vol. 32, pp. 137–41.—Ed.
[3] The speech delivered by Krzhizhanovsky at the first session of the State Planning Commission (Gosplan) on April 5, 1921.
[4] Reference is to the International Socialist Conference, which was to take place in Stockholm in the summer of 1917. The conference had been proposed by social-chauvinists of the neutral countries.
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