V. I. Lenin

Speech Delivered At An All-Russia Conference
Of

Political Education
Workers Of Gubernia and Uyezd

Education Departments

November 3, 1920 [1]

Comrades, allow me to speak on several ideas, some of which were dealt with by the Central Committee of the Communist
Party and by the Council of People’s Commissars in connection with the formation of the Chief Committee for Political
Education, while others came to me in connection with the draft
submitted to the Council of People’s Commissars. This draft
was adopted yesterday as a basis; its details have still to be
discussed.

I shall permit myself only to say, for my part, that at first I
was highly averse to any change in the name of your institution. In my opinion, the function of the People’s
Commissariat of Education is to help people learn and teach others. My Soviet experience has taught me to regard
titles as childish jokes; after all, any title is a joke in its
way. Another name has now been endorsed: the Chief Committee for
Political Education.

As this matter has already been decided, you moist take this as
nothing more than a personal remark. If the matter is not limited
merely to a change of label, it is only to be welcomed.

If we succeed in drawing new people into cultural and educational work, it will not be just a change of title, and then
we can reconcile ourselves to the “Soviet” weakness of sticking a label on every new undertaking and every new
institution. If we succeed, we shall have achieved something more
than ever before.

The link between education and our policy should be the chief
inducement in making people join us in our cultural and
educational work. A title may express something if there is a need
for it, for along the whole line of our educational work we have
to abandon the old standpoint that education should be non-political; we cannot conduct educational work in isolation
from politics.

That idea has always predominated in bourgeois society. The
very term “apolitical” or “non-political” education is a piece of bourgeois hypocrisy, nothing but
humbuggery practised on the masses, 99 per cent of whom are
humiliated and degraded by the rule of the church, private
property and the like. That, in fact, is the way the bourgeoisie,
still in the saddle in all bourgeois countries, is deceiving the
masses.

The greater the importance of a political apparatus in such
countries, the less its independence of capital and its
policy.

In all bourgeois states the connection between the political
apparatus and education is very strong, although bourgeois society
cannot frankly acknowledge it. Nevertheless, this society
indoctrinates the masses through the church and the institution of
private property.

It is one of our basic tasks to contrapose our own truth to
bourgeois “truth”, and win its recognition.

The transition from bourgeois society to the policy of the
proletariat is a very difficult one, all the more so for the
bourgeoisie incessantly slandering us through its entire apparatus
of propaganda and agitation. It bends every effort to play down an
even more important mission of the dictatorship of the proletariat, its educational mission, which is particularly
important in Russia, where the proletariat constitutes a minority
of the population. Yet in Russia this mission must be given
priority, for we must prepare the masses to build up socialism. The dictatorship of the proletariat would have been out
of the question if, in the struggle against the bourgeoisie, the
proletariat had not developed a keen class-consciousness, strict
discipline and profound devotion, in other words, all the
qualities required to assure the proletariat’s complete
victory over its old enemy.

We do not hold the utopian view that the working masses are
ready for a socialist society. From precise facts provided by the
entire history of working-class socialism we know that this is not
the case, and that preparedness for socialism is created only by
large-scale industry, by the, strike struggle and by political
organisation. To win the victory and accomplish the socialist
revolution, the proletariat must be capable of concerted action,
of overthrowing the exploiters. We now see that it has acquired
all the necessary qualities, and that it translated them into
action when it won power.

Education workers, and the Communist Party as the vanguard in
the struggle, should consider it their fundamental task to help
enlighten and instruct the working masses, in order to cast off
the old ways and habituated routine we have inherited from the old
system, the private property habits the masses are thoroughly
imbued with. This fundamental task of the entire socialist
revolution should never be neglected during consideration of the
particular problems that have demanded so much attention from the
Party’s Central Committee and the Council of People’s
Commissars. What kind of structure should the Chief Committee for
Political Education have? How should it be linked up with other
institutions? How should it be linked up, not only with the centre
but with local bodies? These questions will be answered by
comrades who are more competent in the matter, have already gained
considerable experience, and have made a special study of the
matter. I would like merely to stress the main principles
involved. We must put the matter frankly and openly affirm,
despite all the old untruths, that education cannot but be linked
up with politics.

We are living in an historic period of struggle against the
world bourgeoisie, which is far stronger than we are. At this
stage of the struggle, we have to safeguard the development of the
revolution and combat the bourgeoisie in the military sense and
still more by means of our ideology through education, so that the
habits, usages and convictions acquired by the working class in
the course of many decades of struggle for political liberty-the
sum total of these habits, usages and ideasshould serve as an
instrument for the education of all working people. It is for the
proletariat to decide how the latter are to be educated. We must
inculcate in the working people the realisation that it is
impossible and inexcusable to stand aside in the proletariat’s struggle, which is now spreading more and more
to all capitalist countries in the world, and to stand aside in
international politics. An alliance of all the world’s powerful capitalist countries against Soviet Russia-such is the
real basis of international politics today. And it must, after
all, be realised that on this will depend the fate of hundreds of
millions of working people in the capitalist countries. We know
that, at the present moment, there is not a corner of the earth
which is not under the control of a small group of capitalist
countries. Thus the situation is shaping in such a way that one is
faced with the alternative of standing aloof from the present
struggle and thereby proving one’s utter lack of political
consciousness, just like those benighted people who have held
aloof from the revolution and, the war and do not see the
bourgeoisie’s gross deception of the masses, the deliberate
way in which the bourgeoisie is keeping the masses in ignorance;
or else of joining the struggle for the dictatorship of the
proletariat.

It is with absolute frankness that we speak of this struggle of
the proletariat; each man must choose between joining our side or
the other side. Any attempt to avoid taking sides in this issue
must end in fiasco.

Observation of the many remnants of the Kerensky gang, the
Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Social-Democrats, as represented
by the Yudeniches, Kolchaks, Petlyuras, Makhnos and others, has
shown us such a variety of forms and shades of counter-revolution
in various parts of Russia that we have every reason to consider
ourselves far more steeled in the struggle than anybody else is. A
glance at Western Europe shows the same thing happening there as
in our country-a repetition of our own history. Almost everywhere
elements similar to the Kerensky gang are to be met alongside the
bourgeoisie. They predominate in a number of countries, especially
Germany. One can see the same thing everywhere-the impossibility
of taking an intermediate position, and a clear realisation that
there must be either a whiteguard dictatorship (for which -the
bourgeoisie of all the countries of Western Europe are preparing
by arming against us), or the dictatorship of the proletariat. We
have experienced this so acutely and profoundly that there is no
need for me to talk at length about the Russian Communists. Hence
there can be only a single conclusion, one that should be the
corner-stone of all arguments and theories about the Chief
Committee for Political Education: the primacy of the Communist
Party’s policy must be frankly recognised in the work of
that body. We know of no other form of guidance; and no other has
been evolved in any country. Parties may represent the interests
of their class in one degree or another; they may undergo changes
or modifications, but we do not yet know of any better form. The
entire course of the struggle waged by Soviet Russia, which for
three years has withstood the onslaught of world imperialism, is
bound up with the fact that the Party has consciously set out to
help the proletariat perform its function of educator, organiser
and leader, without which the collapse of capitalism is
impossible. The working masses, the masses of peasants and
workers, must oust the old intellectualist habits and re-educate
themselves for the work of building communism. Otherwise the work
of construction cannot be undertaken. Our entire experience shows
that this is a very serious matter, and we must therefore give
prominence to Party primacy and never lose sight of it when
discussing our activities and our organisational development. How
this is to be done will still have to be discussed at length; it
will have to be discussed in the Party’s Central Committee
and in the Council of People’s Commissars. The decree which
was endorsed yesterday laid down the fundamentals in respect of
the Chief Committee for Political Education, but it has not yet
gone through all the stages in the Council of People’s
Commissars. The decree will be published within the next few days,
and you will see that its final form makes no direct mention of
relations with the Party.

We must, however, know and remember that, in law and in
practice, the Constitution of the Soviet Republic is based on the
tenet that the Party rectifies, prescribes and builds according to
a single principle-to enable the communist elements linked with
the proletariat to imbue the proletariat with their own spirit,
win its adherence, and open its eyes to the bourgeois deceit which
we have been trying so long to eliminate. The People’s
Commissariat of Education has gone through a long struggle; for a
long time the teachers’ organisation resisted the socialist
revolution. Bourgeois prejudices have struck very deep root among
the teachers. There has been a long struggle in the form of direct
sabotage and of tenacious bourgeois prejudices, and we have to
fight for the communist positions slowly, step by step and win
them. The Chief Committee for Political Education, which is
concerned with extra-mural education, the work of educating and
enlightening the masses, is faced with the clear task of combining
Party leadership with the effort to gain the adherence of, to
imbue with its spirit and to animate with its initiative, this
half-million strong army of teachers, this vast institution which
is now in the service of the workers. Education workers-the
teachers-were trained in the spirit of bourgeois prejudices and
habits, in a spirit hostile to the proletariat, with which they
have had no ties whatever. We must now train a new army of
teachers and instructors who must be in close touch with the Party
and its ideas, be imbued with its spirit, and attract the masses
of workers, instilling the spirit of communism into them and
arousing their interest in what is being done by the
Communists.

Since the old customs, habits and ideas must be discarded, the
Chief Committee for Political Education and its personnel are
faced with a most important task, which they must keep uppermost
in their minds. Here we indeed have a dilemma: how can we
establish a link between the teachers, most of whom are of the old
school, with Party members, with the Communists? That is an
extremely difficult problem, one that will require a considerable
amount of thought.

Let us consider the means of establishing organisational links
between people who are so different. In principle, we cannot for a
moment doubt the need of the Communist Party’s primacy. Consequently, the purpose of political culture, of
political instruction, is to train genuine Communists capable of
stamping out falsehood and prejudices and helping the working
masses to vanquish the old system and build up a state without
capitalists, without exploiters, and without landowners. How can
that be done? Only by acquiring the sum total of knowledge that
the teachers have inherited from the bourgeoisie. Without this the
technical achievements of communism will be impossible, and all
hopes for those achievements would be pipe dreams. So the question
arises: how are we to organise these people, who are not used to
bringing politics into their work, especially the politics that is
to our advantage, i.e., politics essential to communism? That, as
I have said, is a very difficult problem. We have discussed the
matter in the Central Committee, and in discussing it have tried
to take into account the lessons of experience. We think that a
congress like the one I am addressing today, a conference like
yours, will be of great value in this respect. Every Party
Committee now has to look from a new angle upon every propagandist, who used to be regarded merely as a man belonging to
a definite circle, a definite organisation. Each of them belongs
to a ruling party which directs the whole state, and the Soviet
Russia’s world struggle against the bourgeois system. He is
a representative of a fighting class and of a party which runs,
and must run, an enormous machine of state. Many a Communist who
has been through the splendid school of underground work and has
been tested and steeled in the struggle is unwilling or unable to
understand the full significance of this change, of this
transition, which turns the agitator and propagandist into a
leader of agitators, a leader in a huge political organisation. The kind of title he is given, even if it is an
embarrassing one-such as superintendent of general schools-does
not matter much; what is important is that he should be capable of
directing the mass of teachers.

It should be said that the hundreds of thousands of teachers
constitute a body that must get the work moving, stimulate
thought, and combat the prejudices that to this day still persist
among the masses. The heritage of capitalist culture, the fact
that the mass of the teachers are imbued with its defects, which
prevent them from being Communists, should not deter us from
admitting these teachers into the ranks of the political education
workers, for these teachers possess the knowledge without which we
cannot achieve our aim.

We must put hundreds of thousands of useful people to work in
the service of communist education. That is a task that was
accomplished at the front, in our Red Army, into which tens of
thousands of representatives of the old army were incorporated. In
the lengthy process of re-education, they became welded with the
Red Army, as they ultimately proved by their victories. This is an
example that we must follow in our cultural and educational
work. True, this work is not so spectacular, but it is even more
important. We need every agitator and propagandist; he will be
doing his job if he works in a strictly Party spirit but at the
same time does not limit himself to Party work, and remembers that
it is his duty to direct hundreds of thousands of teachers, whet
their interest, overcome their old bourgeois prejudices, enlist
them in the work we are doing, and make them realise the immensity
of our work. It is only by tackling that job that we can lead this
mass of people, whom capitalism suppressed and drew away from us,
along the right path.

Such are the aims that every agitator and propagandist working
in the sphere of extra-mural education must pursue and constantly
keep in sight. A host of practical difficulties will be
encountered in the process, and you must help the cause of
communism by becoming representatives and leaders, not only of
Party study-circles, but of the entire state administration, which
is now in the hands of the working class.

We must overcome resistance from the capitalists in all its
forms, not only in the military and the political spheres, but
also ideological resistance, which is the most deep-seated and the
strongest. It is the duty of our educational workers to accomplish
the re-education of the masses. The interest, the thirst for
education and knowledge of communism which are to be seen among
them are a guarantee of our victory in this field too, although,
perhaps, not as rapid as at the front and only after great
difficulties and at times even reverses. However, we shall
ultimately win.

Last, I should like to dwell on one more point. Perhaps the
title of Chief Committee for Political Education is not properly
understood. Inasmuch as it makes mention of the political concept,
politics is the main thing here.

But how is politics to be understood? If politics is understood
in the old sense, one may fall into a grave and profound
error. Politics means a struggle between classes; means the
relations of the proletariat in its struggle for its emancipation,
against the world bourgeoisie. However, in our struggle two
aspects of the matter stand out: on the one hand, there is the
task of destroying the heritage of the bourgeois system, of
foiling the repeated attempts of the whole bourgeoisie to crush
the Soviet state. This task has absorbed most of our attention
hitherto and has prevented us from proceeding to the other task,
that of construction. According to the bourgeois world outlook,
politics was divorced, as it were, from economics. The bourgeoisie
said: peasants, you must work for your livelihood; workers, you
must work to secure your means of subsistence on the market; as
for economic policy, that is the business of your masters. That,
however, is not so; politics should be the business of the people,
the business of the proletariat. Here we must emphasise the fact
that nine-tenths of our time and our work is devoted to the
struggle against the bourgeoisie. The victories over Wrangel, of
which we read yesterday, and of which you will read today and
probably tomorrow, show that one stage of the struggle is coming
to an end and that we have secured peace with a number of Western
countries; every victory on the war front leaves our hands freer
for the internal struggle, for the politics of state organisation. Every step that brings us closer to victory over
the whiteguards gradually shifts the focus of the struggle to
economic policy. Propaganda of the old type describes and
illustrates what communism is. This kind of propaganda is now
useless, for we have to show in practice how socialism is to be
built. All our propaganda must be based on the political
experience of economic development. That is our principal task;
whoever interprets it in the old sense will show himself to be a
retrograde, one who is incapable of conducting propaganda work
among the masses of the peasants and workers. Our main policy must
now be to develop the state economically, so as to gather in more
poods of grain and mine more poods of coal, to decide how best to
utilise these poods of grain and coal and preclude starvation-that
is our policy. All our agitation and propaganda must be focussed
on this aim. There must be less fine talk, for you cannot satisfy
the working people with fine words. As soon as the war enables us
to shift the focus from the struggle against the bourgeoisie, from
the struggle against Wrangel and the whiteguards, we shall turn to
economic policy. And then agitation and propaganda will play a
role of tremendous and ever growing importance.

Every agitator must be a state leader, a leader of all the
peasants and workers in the work of economic development. He must
tell them what one should know, what pamphlets and books one
should read to become a Communist.

That is the way to improve our economic life and make it more
secure, more social; that is the way to increase production,
improve the food situation and distribution of the goods produced,
increase coal output, and restore industry without capitalism and
without the capitalist spirit.

What does communism consist in? All propaganda for communism
must be conducted in a way that will amount to practical guidance
of the state’s development. Communism must be made comprehensible to the masses of the workers so that they will
regard it as their own cause. That task is being poorly
accomplished, and thousands of mistakes are being made. We make no
secret of the fact. However, the workers and the peasants must
themselves build up and improve our apparatus, with our
assistance, feeble and inadequate as it is. To us, that is no
longer a programme, a theory, or a task to be accomplished; it has
become a matter of actual and practical development. Although we
suffered some cruel reverses in our war, we have at least learnt
from these reverses and won complete victory. Now, too, we must
learn a lesson from every defeat and must remember that the
workers and peasants have to be instructed by taking the work
already performed as an example. We must point out what is bad, so
as to avoid it in future.

By taking constructive work as an example, by repeating it time
and again, we shall succeed in turning inefficient communist
managers into genuine builders, and, in the first place, into
builders of our economic life. We shall achieve our targets and
overcome all the obstacles which we have inherited from the old
system and cannot be eliminated at a single stroke. We must
re-educate the masses; they can be re-educated only by agitation
and propaganda. The masses must be brought, in the first place,
into the work of building the entire economic life. That must be
the principal and basic object in the work of each agitator and
propagandist, and when he realises this, the success of his work
will be assured. (Loud applause.)

Endnotes

[1]
The Conference met in Moscow from November 2 to 8, 1920, with 283
delegates attending. The main question discussed was the
establishment of the Chief Committee for Political Education.
A. V. Lunacharsky delivered the opening address, in which he
dealt with the work done in the sphere of political education.
The Conference also heard a report by N. K. Krupskaya on the
current plan of work of the Chief Committee for Political
Education, and Y. A. Litkens’s report on the organisation of
local political education departments. Other items on the agenda
concerned the food campaign and political education, production
propaganda in the light of the rehabilitation of economic
activity, and the elimination of illiteracy. Lenin spoke after
Krupskaya at the third session of the Conference, on the second
day of the proceedings.