Comrades, first of all I must apologize that after the speech at that meeting I am not only hoarse, but also feel tired and can therefore give you a brief greeting and briefly at least outline the main things that have been undertaken in the Council of People's Commissars lately. The main subject of concern and the aim of action in recent times, in recent months and weeks, has been the struggle against hunger2. You know, of course, comrades, what a tremendous evil hunger is, you know that just now, on the eve of the spring and the military [campaign], we are facing the most difficult period, just as last year the end of winter, the spring and the beginning of summer were the most difficult times, this year we are just now entering a difficult period. Now the hopes of the White Guards, landlords and capitalists that they, not being able to break the Soviet power in the struggle, might play once more on the famine, are increasing again. And there are people who call themselves Mensheviks, SRs of the right and left, who fall so low that they pay lip service to being supporters of the working people, and when the food situation worsens, when famine is imminent, they try to play on this and pit the masses against the power of the workers and peasants, and they do not realize, that just as the treason of the Left SR Muravyov last year on the Eastern Front3 cost the lives of tens of thousands of workers and peasants in the war with the White Guards, so now every such policy, every agitation and play on hunger, which the Left SRs allegedly carry on for the benefit of the workers, is nothing but direct aid to the White Guards. Any such thing, which is carried out on the ground of agitation, means thousands of unnecessary victims in the war against the White Guards, as was the case last year, when Muravyev committed treason and nearly opened the whole front, and inflicted a whole series of heavy defeats. I would, therefore, like first of all and most of all to state in the briefest manner the main facts. If our situation is now again, as it was in the spring of last year, worsened, we have now a serious hope not only that we shall conquer this difficulty, but that we shall come out better than last year. These hopes are based on the fact that things are much better in the East and South, and that the East and South are the chief breadbaskets. In a whole series of meetings of the Council of Defense and the Council of [People's] Commissars during the last few days we have accurately found out that on the roads from Kazan to Saratov and on the Volga-Bugulma road from Samara to the east beyond the Volga there is up to 9 million poods of ready bread4. All the enormous difficulty, all the great danger lies in the fact that our transportation is so sick and the shortage of steam locomotives so great that we are not sure whether we will take out this bread. This has been the chief concern in our activities of late and this is why we have gone to such a measure as the cessation, the complete stoppage of passenger traffic from March 18 to April 105. We know that it is difficult. There will be agitators helping the White Guards who will shout: look, the people are starving, and they have taken away passenger trains from you so that you cannot carry bread. These agitators are there. But we say to ourselves: in all difficulties we count on the conscience of honest workers, and they will be for us. The suspension of traffic, as we have been informed by specialists, will free 200 steam locomotives. These passenger locomotives are weaker than the freight locomotives, less capable, but we have calculated that they are able to give up to three and a half million poods during this time. And if during this time the bread were carried alone by sack men, hungry people who rush about, they would at the very best take out half a million poods.

This truth will be confirmed by an experienced railroad worker, this truth will be told by anyone who has been [on] the Zavolzhskaya road and seen how the bread is piled sometimes directly on the snow. These sacks with bread can die, the bread is already damp; it will be especially bad when the floods begin. We took this heavy measure, confident that the truth could not be concealed from the vast mass of workers, that they would not be led astray from the right path by the agitators of the Left SRs, and that this truth would win. A heavy measure, like the suspension of passenger traffic, is able to give several million poods of bread. When hunger increases with the approach of spring, we must put aside the lies, slanders and fables that it is harmful to stop the passenger traffic, we must say that we have gone for it because it will give more bread [with] the help of the Petrograd, Moscow and Ivanovo-Voznesen workers who are going south for bread. No city has given so much strength to the organization of the food cause as Petrograd, all the best forces have already been put to work, and we say that this is what the workers of the advanced cities must do, the socialist revolution cannot be accomplished without the working class, it cannot be accomplished unless the working class has accumulated so much strength to lead the tens of millions of capitalism-stricken, exhausted, illiterate and dispersed village people, only the advanced workers can lead, but the best forces have already been exhausted, exhausted and tired, they must be hired We have taken a number of measures to send the best forces to the Volga-Bugulma road together with a detachment of workers, Bryukhanov has been sent there, military men have been sent to1*.... We say that we have a serious hope that when we exert all our forces and call the workers to our aid, we will have this bread. This spring and summer, to which we are heading, will be a hard half-year, but it will be the last half-year hard, because instead of an enemy that is getting stronger, we have an enemy that is decaying, we have the growth of the Soviet movement in all countries.

These, comrades, are the grounds on which we, reasoning cautiously and having checked our calculations many times, have declared that the cessation of passenger traffic will make it possible to bring in several million poods of bread, makes it possible to utilize the richest breadbasket of the East. We have reason to hope that in this difficult half-year our main enemy - hunger - will be defeated; besides, we are in better conditions than last year, because we have reserves. Last year the Czechoslovaks reached Kazan and Simbirsk, the Ukraine was under the heel of the Germans, Krasnov was building troops on the Don on German money, the South was cut off from us; now Ukraine is free from the German imperialists, who wanted to take out of Ukraine 60 million poods, but took out only 9 million poods, in addition they took out a thing which they cannot digest, this is Bolshevism; this is what the German imperialists flew on, what the French and English imperialists will fly on, if they are able to move deep into Russia. That is why we have now Soviet Ukraine. And the Soviet Government in Ukraine, when the question of bread arises, will set the price not in the bargainer's way, not as it is set by the speculator and that man who says: a hungry man will give a hundred roubles a pood, I spit on any monopoly, I only want to make a profit, and if the people are hungry, so much the better, they will give more; this is the way the village bourgeoisie, the kulaks, the speculators and all those who shout against the bread monopoly, who stand for free trade, help them. But free trade will let the rich man get rich and starve to death the worker, who will get nothing. And the Ukrainian government said: the first task is to help the starving North. Ukraine cannot hold out if the hunger-starved North does not hold out; Ukraine will hold out and win for sure if it helps the hungry North. Ukraine's bread reserves are gigantic. It is impossible to take it all at once. We sent our best Soviet forces to the Ukraine, and we received with one voice the following message: the bread reserves are enormous, but it is impossible to take everything out at once, there is no apparatus. The Germans have ruined the Ukraine to such an extent that any apparatus is just beginning to take shape there, there is complete chaos. The worst times, when we sat in Smolny in the first weeks after the October Revolution and fought the devastation, are nothing compared to the difficulties we see in Ukraine. The cry comes from the Soviet comrades that there are no people, that there is no one to build Soviet power, that there is no apparatus, no proletarian center like Peter and Moscow, and that the Ukrainian centers are in the hands of the enemy. Kiev is not a proletarian center; the Donetsk basin, exhausted by hunger, is not liberated from the Cossacks, to our aid, workers of the North! And we say therefore in the name of the Ukrainian comrades to the workers of St. Petersburg, knowing that they have given more than any other city: give more, strain more of your efforts. We can now and we must help the Ukrainian comrades, because they have to build the apparatus of Soviet power on a place cleared and devastated in a way that has not been tolerated and suffered anywhere else. We, comrades, in the Central Committee of our Party, having discussed this situation, gave the task to the Ukrainian comrades to first do everything for the construction of the apparatus in order to take up the work when there is an instrument in their hands, when there is an apparatus, and to give 50 million poods of bread on June 1. Such is the task we have set, weighing all the difficulties. I do not at all want to assure you that this task will be accomplished. We all know that no matter how many tasks we undertook, we could not fulfill them by the specified deadline. Let part of this task be accomplished. But nevertheless, you should know that on a rainy day, when hunger will become more and more acute in our country, and when the whole food apparatus will be in full swing in the East and the South, there is a possibility of receiving emergency aid from the South and of improving the situation.

Besides the Ukraine there is another source - this source is the Don region. There the victories of the Red Army have done wonders. Only a few weeks ago our army was on the Don in the war with Krasnov, the main enemy, the officers, the Cossacks, who were bribed by millions first by the Germans and then by the British and French2*.... which they carried, continue to carry even now. For only a few weeks our situation was dire; now with tremendous speed we have taken possession not only as far as Tsaritsyn, but have passed south of Tsaritsyn. The Krasnovsky and Don counter-revolutionaries are broken, no help from the imperialists has helped them. All this means that we have made our way to coal and to bread, without which we are perishing, for for lack of coal the railroads and factories are stopped, for lack of bread the workers in the cities and in general non-agricultural areas are experiencing the agony of hunger. The Red Army is doing its duty under conditions of extraordinary difficulty, at a time when all the world is exhausted by war, our army has become slender, here are fighting men who endure an immeasurably harder war than under the tsar, but endure because they see that near every military chief sits a commissar of Communists and the best worker of Petersburg or Moscow or Ivanovo-Voznesensk, in every military unit communist cells are built, every headquarters is turned into an agitation and propaganda center, the whole strength of the army rests on one thing and one thing only - on its closest connection with the best workers of Petrograd, Moscow and Ivanovo-Voznesensk. This is what has made the break and done wonders, that from an army which fled at the mere word "Cossack" has become an army which in a few weeks has taken possession of the two railroad lines which are the main routes to bread and coal. The stocks of bread on the Don are enormous, there we cannot say that there is no apparatus, in every military unit there is a Communist cell, commissars from the workers, a group of workers food workers, there the main difficulty was that the White Guards during the retreat blew up the bridges and therefore neither of the two main lines was usable. We devoted the last meeting of the Council of Defense and the Council of People's Commissars to summoning specialists and questioning them about how to get material for mending and what to do to mend at least one of these lines. At the last meeting of the Defense Council we were able to ascertain that, thanks to a tremendous exertion of forces, not only have the materials been delivered, but we have assurances from comrades from the field that they almost guarantee us the restoration of both lines before the floods6. This restoration of transport on the two lines is worth, perhaps, many victories over the Cossacks, it makes it possible to say: comrades, we must hold out for a few more difficult months, strain our efforts, give help to the Petrograd, Moscow and Ivanovo-Voznesen workers, except in the East, from where it is difficult to bring supplies, except in the Ukraine, where there are enormous supplies but no apparatus yet, there is the Don, where the victories of the Red Army have opened a third source. That is why we say to you with cautious, sober calculation, having verified this by repeated reports and communications from the field, by listening to specialists in the food and railroad business, that we have the most serious well-founded confidence that not only can we hold out as we did last year, but that we can considerably improve our situation.

And we have the right to say that the six months, the hard hungry six months we are in, that period before the new harvest, these six months will in all probability prove to be the last hard six months, because our main enemy, the imperialists of England, France and Italy, who are now feeding the troops of Arkhangelsk, Siberia, Krasnov, Odessa with their money and shells, this enemy is formidable and is decaying internally, this enemy will by no means last long. Comrades, we were especially convinced of this by what we heard from the foreign comrades who came here, with whom we had recently founded the Communist International in Moscow. When these comrades, in addition to their stories, gave us the exact facts, showed us the numbers of the newspapers which had been concealed from us, when we read in the French newspaper "L'Humanite" that in Paris speakers were driven off the podium at public meetings for daring to say a word against Bolshevism, then we say to ourselves: victory is ours. Still the gentlemen imperialists, the gentlemen bourgeois can shed the blood of tens of thousands of workers, can kill more Rosa Luxemburg and Liebknecht, can kill hundreds more of the best representatives of the International, can fill the prisons of England, France and Italy with socialists, this the bourgeoisie can do as far as it has the power to increase the suffering and torment and shed the blood of the best socialists of Germany and other countries, but it will not help. What the Soviets are, what Soviet power is - this, in spite of all the lies, all the streams of lies and dark slander, the workers of all countries have realized. And there is no way out for the capitalists of all countries. They will fight at the time when they make peace. France is ready to throw herself at Italy, they have not divided the spoils, Japan is arming against America. They have heaped upon the nations unheard of tribute, billions and billions in war loans. But the nations are war-weary everywhere, everywhere there are food shortages, production has stopped, everywhere there is hunger. In a country like France the production of wheat has been more than halved. The Entente, which promises to help left and right, cannot feed its own countries. The working masses of Paris, London and New York have translated the word Soviets into their own languages, have made this word understandable to every worker, knowing that the old bourgeois republic cannot help the cause, that only workers' power can help. They know what Soviet power is.

If in Russia the Soviet power faces enormous difficulties, it is because the military force of the most armed, the strongest powers of the whole world has fallen upon Russia. And in spite of this, the Soviet power of Russia has managed to win the feeling of support, the attention of the workers of the whole world. And on the basis of these data, without exaggerating them at all, without closing our eyes to the fact that both in Germany and in other countries the blood of the workers is being shed and that many of the best leaders of socialism are being brutally tortured - we know this, we do not close our eyes to it, nevertheless we say that we have secured a complete victory for us, because the imperialists of other countries are bent, the workers are already coming out of the state of fog and deception. Soviet power has already won itself victory in the minds of the workers of the whole world, everywhere hopes are pinned only on the fact that they will organize the Soviets, hope is seen in the fact that they will take power into their own hands, when the workers know that even undeveloped in a backward country united workers, taking power into their own hands, have been able to create a force that resists the imperialists of the whole world, when the workers have been able to take the factories from the capitalists and give the land to the landlord peasants, when this truth seeps into the working masses of all countries, we once again say to ourselves and to you with full confidence that victory is assured for us on a world scale, because the bourgeoisie is shaken, it cannot deceive the workers, because the Soviet movement has sprung up everywhere and we shall soon see, just as we saw on October 25th, 17th, the birth of the Soviet Republic, the other day we saw in Moscow the birth of the communist 3rd International7 , so we shall soon see the birth of a world federative Soviet republic. (Continued applause.)

Fond 2, op. 1, d. 8885 - uncorrected transcript (typewritten text).

1* In the transcript there is an omission, a dotted line is placed

2* Further in the transcript there is a skip

1C March 11, 1919. V.I.Lenin was in Petrograd in connection with the funeral of M.T.Elizarov.

After Elizarov's burial at Volkov Cemetery on March 13, 1919, Lenin visited the People's House (Petrograd side, Alexandrovsky Park, 3), where he spoke at two rallies. The transcript of his second speech in the Iron Hall (7:40 p.m. to 8:15 p.m.) is published below. The newspaper report of the first speech was published in the newspaper "Severnaya Kommunya" No. 58, March 14, 1919 (see: Lenin V.I. Poln. sobr. op. cit., vol. 38, pp. 31-38).

2In the first quarter of 1919, the following basic laws were adopted: January 11 - the decree of the SNK on the distribution of grain bread and forage to be alienated to the state among the producing provinces (see: Decrees of Soviet Power. Vol. IV, pp. 292-294, 445-446); January 17 - the resolution of a joint session of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, the All-Russian Congress of Trade Unions, the Moscow Soviet, factory and factory committees and trade unions of Moscow on the procurement of foodstuffs. Moscow on the procurement of foodstuffs (see: ibid., pp. 296-298); January 21 - decree of the SNK on the procurement of foodstuffs (see: ibid., pp. 303-304); February 24 - decree of the Defense Council on the order of receiving Red Army rations (see: ibid., p. 431).See: ibid., pp. 431-432; March 4 - decree of the SNK on the organization of the procurement of food, fodder and essentials in the front line (see: ibid., pp. 463-464).

3 After the liquidation of the mutiny of the Left SRs in Moscow, M.A.Muravyev, commander of the Eastern Front, mutinied in Simbirsk, declared himself commander-in-chief of the army against Germany, arrested Soviet and party workers of the city (including the commander of the 1st Army M.N.Tukhachevsky). On July 11, V.I.Lenin and L.D.Trotsky in a telegram "To All, to All" declared Muravyov "a traitor and an enemy of the people" and ordered the troops of the Eastern Front to obey K.A.Mekhonoshin and G.I.Blagonravov (see: Decrees of Soviet Power. Vol. III, pp. 9-10). The Simbirsk Bolsheviks under the leadership of the chairman of the provincial committee of the RCP(b) I.M.Vareikis liquidated the mutiny, on July 11 Muravyev was killed and his detachment was disarmed.

December 425, 1918. V.I.Lenin received a report about the availability of more than one and a half million poods of bread in the town of Melekes and at the stations of the Volga-Bugulma railroad. On the same day this issue was discussed in the Defense Council. It was decided to remove the bread urgently (see: Lenin's Collection XVIII, p. 256).

5This refers to the decree of the SNK of March 10, 1919 on the cessation of passenger traffic in order to bring food and fuel to the centers (see: Decrees of Soviet Power. Vol. IV, pp. 470-473).

6V.I.Lenin speaks of a meeting of the Defense Council on March 10, 1919, at which the question of the number of repair facilities sent to the Southern Front was discussed.

7V.I.Lenin speaks of the establishment of the III Communist International at its first congress in Moscow on March 2-6, 1919.