December 23, 1926

Greetings, Vyacheslav!

There is no need to rush back — you can freely stay another week (or even more) beyond the deadline.

Things are going on the whole not badly here:

1) Procurement and export are going fairly well;

2) Revenue for the state budget has been somewhat poor so far;

3) The chervonets is doing well;

4) Industry is crawling gradually forward;

5) We have adopted a decision on lowering wholesale prices for a number of staple goods;

6) We are working out urgent and concrete measures for lowering retail prices (we will mercilessly press the trade and cooperative network).

The trade union congress went "normally," as Tomsky would say — that is, they preserved everything that existed before but introduced nothing new into their arsenal.

The enlarged ECCI Plenum went quite well. The resolution of the 15th Conference was approved unanimously (one Bordigist from Italy abstained). Our oppositionists are fools. The devil pushed them to go looking for a fight — and they got flogged. In view of Kamenev's hooligan speech, I had to remind him in my concluding remarks about the telegram to M. Romanov. Kamenev came out with a "refutation," saying that "this is a lie." Zinoviev, Kamenev, Smilga, and Fyodorov submitted a "statement" to the Politburo with a "refutation," demanding its publication. We published this statement in Bolshevik together with the CC's response and documents that politically destroy Kamenev. We consider that Kamenev has been put out of action and that he will never again be a member of the CC.

Well, that is all for now. The rest in person. I shake your hand.

December 23, 1926.

Koba.

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Source: Letters of J.V. Stalin to V.M. Molotov. 1925–1936. P. 96–97.

RGASPI. F. 558. Op. 1. D. 5388.

NOTE

The question of reducing wholesale prices for industrial goods was considered by the Politburo on December 23, 1926. In February 1927, the Plenum of the CC of the VKP(b) adopted a decision "On Reducing Wholesale and Retail Prices."

On December 5, 1926, Kamenev made the following statement at the evening session of the ECCI Plenum: "Yesterday Comrade Stalin reported from the rostrum of the Comintern as though in the first days of the February Revolution I had sent a telegram to Mikhail Romanov ...

"The editors of Pravda, of which I was then a member together with Comrades Lenin and Zinoviev, learned of this gossip from the newspaper Edinstvo, which, under the leadership of the well-known renegade and scoundrel Alexinsky, later a monarchist, was in those days conducting a frenzied campaign of slander against the Bolsheviks in general and against each of us (Lenin, Zinoviev, Kamenev) individually ... The provincial lie directed at me personally was assessed by all of us as one of the petty and insignificant pieces of gossip, and we limited ourselves to a few lines of refutation establishing that the telegram in the name of a meeting in a Siberian county town, where I also spoke as an exile, was adopted against my vote...

"Needless to say, it occurred to no one, including Stalin, to attach any significance whatever to this gossip when, two weeks after the appearance of this lie, I was elected, at the April (1917) Conference, on Lenin's proposal, together with him, Zinoviev, and Stalin, to the first legal CC of our party. Since then, for ten years, no one ever dared return to this gossip.

"After ten years of joint work, to repeat such a thing from the rostrum of the Comintern as an argument in conducting a struggle means condemning oneself in the harshest possible way."