Another reason for the additional decay which the Soviets have superimposed upon the degenerated industry that they inherited has been their deplorable policy of exterminating the professional classes—a policy which is summed up in a letter written by the famous Bolshevist writer, Maxim Gorky, to Lenin and printed in the Volya Rossii on October 2, 1920. In this letter Gorky refers to "the extermination of the cultural resources of the country":
While saving our own hides we are cutting off the head of the nation, destroying its brain.
Vladimir Ilitch, I take my stand on their side, and I prefer arrest and imprisonment to complicity, even though it be only silent, in the extermination of the best and most invaluable forces of the Russian people. To me it has become evident that the "Reds" are just such enemies of the people as are the "Whites."
A fourth vice of the Soviet system which is burdening industrial administration is the passing of endless, impractical and unenforceable decrees. Lenin himself refers to certain agricultural decrees as intended primarily for propaganda. And at a meeting reported in Izvestia, Moscow, January 1, 1921, he declared:
In Smolny we have talked more than enough about general principles. Now after three years we have decrees on many points of this question [the trade union question] concerning many of its integral parts. But it is the sad fate of the decrees that they are signed in order to be forgotten and to go unfulfilled by us.
We are able to study differences of opinion in principle and even then make mistakes, we are masters at