Written: Written on October 15, 1921
Published:
First published in part on January 21, 1927 in Komsomolskaya Pravda No. 17.
Published in full in 1928 in Lenin Miscellany VIII.
Printed from the original.
Source:
Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
1971,
Moscow,
Volume 36,
page 548.
Translated: Andrew Rothstein
Transcription\Markup:
R. Cymbala
Public Domain:
Lenin Internet Archive.
You may freely copy, distribute,
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commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet
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• README
October 15
Comrade Avanesov,
Should not part of the shock transport works be handed over by the Supreme Economic Council to the People’s Commissariat for Communications (in connection with yesterday’s question)?[1]
The consumer must be given an incentive.
Think it over.
With communist greetings,
Lenin
As regards storage. Let’s decree:
Workers in stores receive a bonus for clearing 1/8, 1/4, 1/2 of the store if they dispatch (deliver) its contents directly to state productive enterprises (factories, state farms, and the like).
The same bonus is given to those drawing these materials from the stores for delivery to the same factories, etc.
Unless there is personal interest, no damned thing will come of it. We must find a way to produce incentives.
But Troyanovsky is not clever. You will answer for such a “chairman”, you personally. Bear that in mind.
You need a clever man on this job.
[1] A reference to the sitting of the Council of Labour and Defence on October 14, 1921, to discuss the report of the Chief Transport Commission of the Council for June–August 1921. It said that there was a sharp drop in labour productivity in railway and water transport shops because of food and money difficulties and shortage of most materials and spare parts supplied by the transport plants of the Supreme Economic Council.
The reference is to A. A. Troyanovsky, chairman of the Council’s commission to organise the warehouse business, which was set up on October 14, 1921.
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