V. I.   Lenin

633

To:   V. G. YAKOVENKO

Written: Written on February 15, 1922
Published: First published in 1942 in Lenin Miscellany XXXIV. Printed from a typewritten text signed by Lenin.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1976, Moscow, Volume 45, pages 472^b-473^a.
Translated: Yuri Sdobnikov
Transcription\Markup: R. Cymbala
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Comrade Yakovenko,
People’s Commissariat for Agriculture

On January 26, Izvestia VTsIK carried an article by Comrade A. Belyakov entitled “Yearning Motors and Proletarian Agriculture”.

I advise you to give serious attention to this item. It turns out that 770 brand new motors with spare parts, in good condition, in their foreign packaging, with a total of almost 117,000 h.p., and costing over 14 million pre-war gold rubles, have been lying about at the war department for five years. These motors are of no use to the War Department, and are being handed over by it to the People’s Commissariat for Agriculture, which can very well use them for the needs of agriculture. It is four months now since the P.C.A. has been informed of this, bat not a thing has yet been done, apart from exchanges on paper.

This is sheer mismanagement and helplessness.

I propose that:

1. the P.C.A. should give me a written explanation;

2. those guilty of delays and red tape should be found, and a trial of this business should be arranged with wide publicity;

3. this thing should at once be got going in practice most, resolutely, informing me within a month of what has been actually done (when the motors were accepted, how   used, to whom handed over, when and how they will start operating, etc.).[1]

V. Ulyanov (Lenin)
Chairman, Council of People’s Commissars

Notes

[1] In reply to this letter, People’s Commissar for Agriculture, V. G. Yakovenko, informed Lenin on February 21, 1922, that he had ordered an inquiry in connection with A. A. Belyakov’s article in Izvestia VTsIK. Yakovenko wrote that he had handed over the material on this to D. I. Kursky at the People’s Commissariat for Justice to have proceedings started against those guilty of red tape, if he found this necessary.

On May 15, 1922, Yakovenko submitted to Lenin a report on the use of the aeroengines for mechanising agriculture (Central Party Archives of thy Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the C.P.S.U. Central Committee).