Recommendations for the Tenth National Congress of Councils
#PUBLICATION NOTE
This edition of Recommendations for the Tenth National Congress of Councils has been prepared and revised for digital publication by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism under the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Switzerland on the basis of the edition published in the Collected Works of Lenin, Fourth English Edition, Volume 36, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1966.
#INTRODUCTION NOTE
This is a letter from Comrade Nikolaj Lenin in Gorki, Russia to Comrade I.B. Stalin in Moscow, Russia dated the 23rd of December, 1922. It was first published as part of the collection Lenin's Testament in 1956 together with a number of forged documents.
#Workers and oppressed people of the world, unite!
#RECOMMENDATIONS FOR THE TENTH NATIONAL CONGRESS OF COUNCILS
#LETTER TO I.B. STALIN
#Nikolaj Lenin
#23rd of December, 1922
#★
I would urge strongly that at this Congress a number of changes be made in our political structure.
I want to tell you of the considerations to which I attach most importance.
At the head of the list, I set an increase in the number of Central Committee members to a few dozen or even 100. It is my opinion that, without this reform, our Central Committee would be in great danger if the course of events were not quite favourable for us (and that is something we cannot count on).
Then, I intend to propose that the Congress should on certain conditions invest the decisions of the State Planning Commission with legislative force, meeting, in this respect, the wishes of Comrade Trotskij — to a certain extent and on certain conditions.
As for the first point, that is, increasing the number of Central Committee members, I think it must be done in order to raise the prestige of the Central Committee, to do a thorough job of improving our administrative machinery, and to prevent conflicts between small factions of the Central Committee from acquiring excessive importance for the future of the Party.
It seems to me that our Party has every right to demand from the working class 50 to 100 Central Committee members, and that it could get them from it without unduly taxing the resources of that class.
Such a reform would considerably increase the stability of our Party and ease its struggle in the encirclement of hostile States, which, in my opinion, is likely to, and must, become much more acute in the next few years. I think that the stability of our Party would gain a thousandfold by such a measure.