Polemic on General Line of International ... - From Marx to Mao

dozens of suits”. He was also a big gambler at the horseraces.1Such people do not operate all by themselves. They invariablywork hand in glove with functionaries in the statedepartments in charge of supplies and in the commercial andother departments. They have their own men in the policeand judicial departments who protect them and act as theiragents. Even high-ranking officials in the state organs supportand shield them. Here are a few examples.The chief of the workshops affiliated to a Moscow psychoneurologicaldispensary and his gang set up an “undergroundenterprise”, and by bribery “obtained fifty-eight knitting machines”and a large amount of raw material. They enteredinto business relations with “fifty-two factories, handicraftco-operatives and collective farms” and made three millionroubles in a few years. They bribed functionaries of the Departmentfor Combating Theft of Socialist Property and Speculation,controllers, inspectors, instructors and others. 2The manager of a machinery plant in the Russian Federation,together with the deputy manager of a second machineryplant and other functionaries, or forty-three persons in all,stole more than nine hundred looms and sold them to factoriesin Central Asia, Kazakhstan, the Caucasus and other places,whose leading functionaries used them for illicit production. 3In the Kirghiz SSR, a gang of over forty embezzlers andgrafters, having gained control of two factories, organizedunderground production and plundered more than thirty millionroubles’ worth of state property. This gang included theChairman of the Planning Commission of the Republic, aVice-Minister of Commerce, seven bureau chiefs and divisionchiefs of the Republic’s Council of Ministers, National Eco-1Pravda Ukrainy, May 18, 1962.2Izvestia, October 20, 1963, and Izvestia Sunday Supplement, No. 12,1964.3Komsomolskaya Pravda, August 9, 1963.431