Dictated: Dictated by phone at 12.00, November 25, 1922
Published:
First published in 1965 in Collected Works, Fifth (Russian) Ed., Vol. 54.
Printed from a typewritten copy.
Source:
Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
1976,
Moscow,
Volume 45,
pages 593b-594a.
Translated: Yuri Sdobnikov
Transcription\Markup:
R. Cymbala
Public Domain:
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Comrades Trotsky, Zinoviev,
Bukharin and Radek
I have read the document which you have sent me, namely, the draft in German entitled “Outline of Agrarian Action Programme”, compiled mainly by Varga and approved by the commission, and I very much hesitate to support it. I feel that the draft gives virtually nothing new in comparison with the resolution of the Second Congress of the Comintern on the agrarian question. I very much fear that some formulations, diverging, perhaps even accidentally, from the Second Congress resolution, may cause misunderstanding and breed artificial talk about a discrepancy between this draft and the Second Congress resolution. There also seems to be a distinct element which weakens what was said there about supporting the peasant movement, and which is capable of producing some dissent between the needy peasantry and the rural proletariat.
I am unable to go into this question in greater detail and make a sentence-by-sentence collation between Varga’s draft resolution which you have sent in and the Second Congress resolution. I consider it necessary to warn that we should not let ourselves accumulate numerous resolutions on one and the same question which are capable of producing misunderstanding and confusion.
As a minimum, I would propose:
1) To collate the new resolution with the Second Congress resolution sentence by sentence.
2) To give the new resolution the character of something like a partial commentary.
I personally feel that the new resolution is of very doubtful value.[2]
[1] Written after a reading of the draft resolution of the Fourth Congress of the Comintern, “Outline of Agrarian Action Programme”, which had been sent him. In a covering letter G. Y. Zinoviev wrote that he felt that he could not submit the draft for discussion by the congress without Lenin’s comment.
[2] In accordance with Lenin’s suggestions, the draft resolution of the Fourth Congress of the Comintern on the agrarian question was rewritten, in his report to the congress on November 30, Y. S. Varga set out the content of the letter here published and said that the commission elected to complete the draft “was guided in its work above all by Comrade Lenin’s letter”. Changes were introduced into the “Outline of Agrarian Action Programme”, the most important of these being the addition of a subtitle, “Instructions on the Application of the Agrarian Theses of the Second Congress of the Communist International”, which specified the nature of the resolution (see Bulletin IV kongressa Kommunisticheskogo Internatsionala, No. 27, 1922, pp. 11–12).
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