V. I.   Lenin

Addendum to the Draft Decree on
The Organisation of Supply for the Population

Written: November 21, 1918
Published: First published in 1931 in Lenin Miscellany XVIII. Printed from the manuscript.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, 2nd English Edition, Progress Publishers, 1971, Moscow, Volume 42, pages 111^c-112^a.
Translated: Bernard Isaacs
Transcription\Markup: D. Walters
Public Domain: Lenin Internet Archive (2003). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.
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e) Co-operative warehouses and shops are not subject to municipalisation.^[1]

In places where co-operatives were nationalised or municipalised and stocks of goods in co-operative stores requisitioned or confiscated by the local Soviet authorities before publication of this decree, all such co-operatives shall be re-established, their stocks returned to them, the missing goods accounted for and no further obstructions raised to their legitimate activities.

Note:

In restoring the co-operatives measures must be taken to prevent counter-revolutionary or kulak distortion of their activities and to have strict and absolute control over them exercised by the Poor Peasants’ Committees and the local Soviets.^[2]

Notes

[1] The text of the adopted decree reads “nationalisation”.—Ed.

[2] The draft decree on the organisation of supply for the population was discussed at a meeting of the C.P.C. on November 12, 1918, and finally endorsed by the C.P.C. on November 21. Lenin’s addenda were included in the adopted text of the decree, which was published in IzvesUa on November 24.

The question of the co-operatives’ participation in the organisation of supply for the population as dealt with in the draft decree with Lenin’s addenda to it, was misunderstood by some of the leading food supply workers. Lenin clarified this question in a speech delivered at a meeting of delegates from the Moscow Central Workers’ Co-operative on November 26, 1918, in a report on the attitude of the proletariat to petty-bourgeois democrats made at a Moscow Party workers’ meeting on November 27, and in his reply to the discussion (see present edition, Vol. 28, pp. 196-200, 213-16, 221-24).

See also present edition, Vol. 35, p. 376, and Vol. 50, Fifth Russian Edition, Document 378.