Dictated: Dictated by phone on January 26, 1922
Published:
First published in 1959 in Lenin Miscellany XXXVI.
Printed from secretarial notes (typewritten copy).
Source:
Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
1976,
Moscow,
Volume 45,
page 451b.
Translated: Yuri Sdobnikov
Transcription\Markup:
R. Cymbala
Public Domain:
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Comrade Chicherin:
1. Please send me, if possible, the official text of Bonomi’s proposals in the language in which you have received it (it is important for me to have the text of the provisions as formulated by them).[1]
2. Do you know if any influential Entente newspaper has carried the text of Clause 1 of these terms, which was initially published in our newspapers, namely: with the words “system of property” and not just “system”, as, I believe, the official text sent, by Bonomi puts it.[2]
I should also ask you to have the Russian Telegraph Agency’s Foreign Press Service check up whether the words “system of property” have appeared in any foreign newspaper, and if they have, to let me have the issue.
[1] A reference to the radio telegram from the Chairman of the Council of Ministers of Italy, Bonomi, on January 13, 1922, in which, under a decision of the conference of the Allied Supreme Council, held at Cannes from January 6 to 13, he invited, on behalf of the Supreme Council, a Soviet Government delegation to take part in an international economic and financial conference which was to meet at Genoa in early March 1922.
[2] Clause 1 of the Cannes resolution, as published in the Soviet press, said: “No state can claim any right to dictate to another state the principles on which the latter is to regulate its system of ownership, and internal economy and government” (Izvestia VTsIK No. 6, January 10, 1922). This text corresponded with the text of the resolution published in Petit Parisien No. 16385 on January 8. On January 26, G. V. Chicherin wrote, enclosing the issue of the paper: “I am sending you Petit Parisien with the Cannes resolution and a copy of Bonomi. The latter has dropped ‘Système de propriété’.”
Lenin attached great importance to the formulation of § 1 of the Cannes terms, regarding it as an indirect admission of the bankruptcy of the capitalist system of property, and of the inevitable existence of a communist system of property alongside it. Lenin pointed out that the other paragraphs of the Cannes terms, designed to enslave Soviet Russia by foreign capital, were clearly at odds with clause one (see present edition, Vol. 33, pp. 356–57).
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