First Published: Pravda, No. 97, April 7, 1932
Source: J. V. Stalin, Works, Volume 13, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow 1955, pp. 137-138
Transcription/HTML Markup: Hari Kumar for Alliance Marxist-Leninist (North America) and Charles Farrell
Online Version: Stalin Reference Archive (marxists.org) 2000
The work of the Complaints Bureaus[1] is of tremendous importance in the struggle to remove shortcomings in our Party, Soviet, economic, trade-union and Komsomol apparatuses, in improving our administrative apparatus.
Lenin said that without an apparatus we should have perished long ago, and that without a systematic, stubborn struggle to improve the apparatus we should certainly perish. This means that resolute and systematic struggle against conservatism, bureaucracy and red tape in our apparatus is an essential task of the Party, the working class and all the working people of our country.
The tremendous importance of the Complaints Bureaus consists in their being a serious means of carrying out Lenin's behest concerning the struggle to improve the apparatus.
It is indisputable that the Complaints Bureaus have considerable achievements to their credit in this field.
The task is to consolidate the results attained and to achieve decisive successes in this matter. There can be no doubt that if the Complaints Bureaus rally around them all the more active sections of the workers and collective farmers, drawing them into the work of administering the state and attentively heeding the voice of the working people both within and without the Party, these decisive successes will be won.
Let us hope that the five-day review of the work of the Complaints Bureaus will serve as a stimulus for further expansion of their work along the line indicated by our teacher Lenin.
(1) The Complaints Bureau was set up in April 1919 under the People's Commissariat of State Control, which in 1920 was changed to the Peoples' Commissariat of Workers' And peasant' Inspection. The tasks and scoop of the work of the Central Bureau of Complaints & Applications were defined by a regulation dated May 4, 1919, and those of the local departments the Central Bureau by a regulation dated May 24th, 1919, published over the signature of Stalin, People's Commissar of State Control. From the day they were formed the Central and local bureaus did much work in investigating and checking complaints and statements of working people, enlisting in this work an extensive active of workers and peasants. From February 1934 the Bureau of Complaints and Applications was included in the system of the Soviet Control Commission under the Council of People's Commissariats, and from September 1940 it has formed a department of the Peoples Commissariat (subsequently Ministry) of State Control of the USSR.
Stalin's article, "The Importance of the USSR Complaints Bureaus" was written in connection with the all-Union five-day review and checking of the work of the bureaus carried out on April 9-14th, 1932, by a decision of the Presidium of the Central Control Commission of the CPSU(B), and the Collegium of the People's Commissariat of the USSR.