V. I. Lenin

Achievements and Difficulties of the Soviet Government

It is now the right time, when we have succeeded in restoring the revolutionary International, the Communist
International, when the Soviet form of the movement has itself
become both the theoretical and practical programme of the entire
Third International—now that this has been done it is appropriate to review the general course of development of the
Soviets. What are the Soviets? What is the significance of this
form which was created by the masses, and was not invented by any
individual?

It seems to me that the tasks now confronting us, the proletariat that has won power, can be appraised only from this
angle, as can also the degree to which we have attempted to fulfil
these tasks and the degree to which we have succeeded during the
past year under the dictatorship of the proletariat in
Russia.

Only in the light of the general role of the Soviets, of their
general significance, of the place they occupy in world history,
is it possible to understand the situation we found ourselves in,
why we had to act in the way we did and in no other, and how,
looking back, we must examine the correctness or incorrectness of
the steps we took.

And we are now doubly in need of such a more general, broader,
and more far-reaching outlook, because it is some times painful
for Party people in Russia to see faults and defects and feel
dissatisfied with their work, because the practical fulfilment of
the urgent, current, immediate, everyday administrative duties
that have been, and continue to be, the lot of the Soviet
authorities often distracts attention, compels us, in spite of
ourselves—it is no use rebelling against the conditions
under which we have to work—to devote too much attention to
the petty details of administration. They cause us to forget the
general course of the world-wide development of the proletarian dictatorship, its evolution through Soviet
power or, more correctly, the Soviet movement, through the
groping of the proletarian masses within the
Soviets—something we all experienced and have forgotten—and through the attempt to achieve the
dictatorship within the Soviets.

These are the difficulties we have encountered and the general
tasks to which, in my opinion, we must turn our attention so that
we may as far as possible get away from the petty details of
administration in which everybody who is engaged in practical
local government work is absorbed, and so that we may understand
what a long way we, as a contingent of the world proletarian army,
have still to go.

Complete and final victory on a world scale cannot be achieved
in Russia alone; it can be achieved only when the proletariat is
victorious in at least all the advanced countries, or, at all
events, in some of the largest of the advanced countries. Only
then shall we be able to say with absolute confidence that the
cause of the proletariat has triumphed, that our first objective—the overthrow of capitalism—has been
achieved.

We have achieved this objective in one country, and this
confronts us with a second task. Since Soviet power has been
established, since the bourgeoisie has been overthrown in one
country, the second task is to wage the struggle on a world scale,
on a different plane, the struggle of the proletarian state
surrounded by capitalist states.

This situation is an entirely novel and difficult one.

On the other hand, since the rule of the bourgeoisie has been
overthrown, the main task is to organise the development of the
country.

The yellow socialists who have gathered in Berne and now
intend to honour us with a visit by distinguished foreigners, are
extremely fond of repeating that “the Bolsheviks believe in
the almighty power of violence”. This phrase only shows that
those who use it are people, who in the heat of the revolutionary
struggle, when they are being completely crushed by the violence
of the bourgeoisie—look at what is going on in
Germany—are incapable of teaching their own proletariat the
tactics of necessary violence.

Under certain circumstances violence is both necessary and
useful, but there are circumstances under which violence cannot
produce results. There have been cases, however, of not everyone
appreciating this difference, so that it must be discussed. In
October violence—the overthrow of the bourgeoisie by Soviet
power, the removal of the old government, revolutionary
violence—resulted in a brilliant success.

Why? First, because the masses were organised in Soviets, and
secondly, because in the long political period, from February to
October, the position of the enemy—the bourgeoisie—was undermined, sapped, washed away, like a block of ice by the spring
thaw, and internally had been deprived of his strength; and the
movement in October, compared, say, with the present revolutionary
movement in Germany, brought us such a complete and brilliant
victory for revolutionary violence.

May we assume that such a path, such a form of struggle, such
an easy victory for revolutionary violence, is possible if these
conditions do not exist?

It would be a very great mistake to assume that. And the
greater the revolutionary victories achieved under certain
specific conditions the more often does the danger arise of our
allowing ourselves to be flattered by such victories and not
stopping to think coolly, calmly and attentively, about the
conditions that made them possible.

When we tore the Kerensky government and Milyukov’s coalition ministry to shreds, so to speak, compelled them to
shuffle portfolios over and over again, compelled them to play
ministerial leapfrog from right to left, from left to right, up
and down and down and up, it became obvious that they could not
pull together, no matter in what order they sat, and then they
were blown away like so much chaff.

Is the situation that now confronts our practical tasks in
respect of world imperialism anything like that? Of course
not.

That is why the Treaty of Brest created serious difficulties
in the sphere of foreign policy, but the mass character of the
movement helped us to overcome them.

But what is the source of the mistakes that caused some of our
comrades to think that we were committing a heinous crime? There
is still an odd crank or two among people able to wield the pen
who imagine that they are somebodies, that they have experience,
can teach others, and so forth, who even now assert that this was
a compromise with German imperialism.

Yes, we made the same compromise when we “compromised” with the tsar by entering the
disgusting, reactionary Duma and undermining it from within.

Can we count on the overthrow of world imperialism merely by
force before the proletariat in those imperialist countries has
reached the necessary stage of development?

If the question is presented in this way—and we as
Marxists have always taught that this is the only way to present
the question—we must agree that it would be very absurd and
foolish to employ the policy of violence under those circumstances, and complete failure to understand the conditions
under which a policy of violence can be successful.

Now we realise this; we have gained experience.

While we, at the time of the Treaty of Brest, were obliged to
muster our forces and amidst the most extraordinary difficulties
lay the foundations of a new army, the Red Army, in a country
ruined and exhausted by war to a greater degree than any other
country in the world, while we, in the first half and the
beginning of the second half of 1918, were, stone by stone, laying
the foundations of a genuine socialist Red Army, the imperialism
of other countries was being sapped by internal disintegration and
the growing discontent, and was becoming enfeebled.

And revolutionary violence triumphed in Germany after many
months of development of the struggle had sapped the strength of
imperialism in that country; and the same thing is now being
repeated to some extent—to some extent, but not entirely—in the Entente countries.

An American who had watched events in the West-European
countries very closely, at first hand, and without prejudice, said
to me recently, “France is undoubtedly on the eve of a great
disappointment, the collapse of illusions. The French people are
being fed with promises—you are the victors, they are told.” The bourgeoisie is taking advantage of the old
patriotic sentiments of the entire French nation, of their anger
at the way they were crushed in 1870, and of their fury at the way
the country has been depopulated, bled white and exhausted by four years of war—the bourgeoisie
is taking advantage of all this to divert these sentiments into
chauvinist channels: “We have beaten the Germans; our pockets will now be filled, and we shall be able to
relax.” But the dispassionate American, looking at things
like a businessman, says, “The Germans will not pay, for
they have nothing to pay with.”

That is why the French nation is being fed with promises and
fairy-tales about the peace, the final victory, that is coming
soon. But peace means the collapse of all hopes of being able to
crawl out of this bloody mire at least partly alive—with
broken arms and legs, but alive. It will be impossible to crawl
out of this peace while the old capitalist system is intact,
because the war has piled up such a heap of debts, such a mass of
ruins throughout the capitalist world, that it is impossible to
crawl out of it without upsetting the whole pile and starting an
avalanche.

Even those who are not revolutionaries, who have no faith in
revolution, and dread it, are nevertheless discussing it
theoretically and will be convinced by the course of events, by
the consequences of the imperialist war, that there is no way out
except revolution.

I repeat, I was particularly astonished by the
American’s appraisal of the situation from the point of view
of a business man who, of course, has not studied the theory of
the class struggle and sincerely thinks it is nonsense, but who is
interested in millions and thousands of millions, and being able
to count, asks: “Will they pay or not?” And he answers, again from the shrewd businessman’s point of view:
“They have nothing to pay with! You will not even get 20
kopeks in the ruble!

It is in such a situation in all the Entente countries that we
see profound and widespread unrest stimulated by the workers’ sympathy for the Soviet form.

A Paris crowd, for example, is perhaps more sensitive than any
assembly of people in any other country, because the people there
have had a very good schooling, they have made a number of
revolutions—and there, this most responsive crowd, which
will not allow a speaker to strike a false note, now interrupts
those who dare to say anything against the Bolsheviks. And yet,
only a few months ago, nobody could even as much as hint that he
is in favour of Bolshevism without being jeered at by the very
same crowd.

Meanwhile the Paris bourgeoisie has set its entire machine of
lies, slander and deception in motion against Bolshevism. But now
we know what this means, for in 1917 we Bolsheviks experienced the
persecution of the entire bourgeois press. The bourgeoisie in our
country, however, miscalculated slightly and overdid it in
thinking that they could enmesh the Bolsheviks in their net of
slander; they overdid things so badly, they went so far in their
attacks that they gave us a free advertisement and compelled even
the most backward workers to say to themselves: “Well, if
the capitalists are abusing the Bolsheviks so much, it shows that
those Bolsheviks know how to fight the capitalists!”

That is why the policy which we were obliged to pursue at the
time of the Brest peace, a most brutal, violent and humiliating
peace, proved to be the only correct policy that could have been
pursued.

And I think that it will be useful to recall this policy once
again at the present time when a similar situation is arising in
the Entente countries, when there, too, the bourgeoisie is filled
with a mad desire to thrust their debts, poverty and ruin on
Russia, to plunder Russia and crush her in order to divert the
rising anger of the masses of their own working people from
themselves.

Looking at the situation dispassionately we must say to
ourselves very clearly, if we do not want to fool ourselves and
others—this is a dangerous thing for revolutionaries to
indulge in—we must say that as far as military strength is
concerned, the Entente is stronger than we are. But if we look at
things in the light of their development, we shall also say very
definitely and with a conviction based not only on our revolutionary views but also on our experience, that the strength
of the Entente countries will not last, they are on the threshold
of a great and abrupt change in the temper of their masses.

They have been feeding both French and British workers with
promises, saying, “We shall finish plundering the whole
world and you will have enough to eat.” This is what the
bourgeois press is shouting and dinning into the ears of the
ignorant masses.

They will probably conclude peace in a few months—if they
do not quarrel among themselves in the meantime, and there are a
number of serious symptoms that this is possible. But if they
succeed in concluding peace without flying at each other’s
throats, this peace will be the beginning of an immediate
collapse, because these unprecedented debts cannot be paid, and
they can do nothing to alleviate the desperate state of ruin,
when in France the production of wheat has dropped to less than
half and famine is knocking at the door everywhere, and the
productive forces have been destroyed; they are unable to do
anything about it.

If we look at the situation soberly we shall have to admit
that the method of appraising affairs which proved so correct in
appraising the Russian revolution is, day after day, indicating
the coming of the world revolution. We know that the streams that
will carry with them the icebergs of the Entente, of capitalism,
of imperialism, are gaining strength day after day.

On the one hand, the Entente countries are stronger than we
are; but on the other hand, they-cannot possibly hold out long
owing to the internal situation.

It is this situation that determines the intricate tasks of
international policy—tasks which we may, and probably will,
have to tackle in the very near future, and which, though I am
insufficiently informed about them in all their detail, I would
like to talk to you-about most of all so that a picture of the
experience of the work done by the Council of People’s
Commissars, work in the sphere of foreign policy, will be
presented to you, comrades, in a clear and interesting form.

The most important of our experiences is the Brest peace. This
is the most significant result of the foreign policy of the
Council of People’s Commissars. We were obliged to play for
time, to retreat, manoeuvre and sign a most humiliating peace
treaty, and in this way gain an opportunity to lay the foundation
of a new socialist army. This foundation we have laid, while our
once mighty and all-powerful enemy is already powerless.

All over the world things are moving in the same direction,
and this is the chief and principal lesson that we must learn and
try to understand as clearly as possible in order to avoid making
mistakes in the extremely intricate, extremely difficult and
extremely involved problems of foreign policy which any day may
confront the Council of People’s Commissars, the Central
Executive Committee, and Soviet power as a whole.

I shall conclude my remarks on foreign policy with this and
proceed to deal with some other extremely important questions.

Comrades, as regards activities in the military field—a
year ago, in February and March 1918, we had no army at all. We
had, perhaps, ten million armed workers and peasants who
constituted the old army that had collapsed completely, was fully
ready and determined to desert, to flee, to abandon everything,
come what may.

At that time this was regarded as an exclusively Russian
phenomenon. People thought that owing to the Russians’ characteristic impatience, or lack of organisation, they would not
hold out, whereas the Germans would.

That is what we were told. And now we see that a few months
have passed and the same thing has happened to the German army,
which was immeasurably superior to ours in culture, equipment, and
discipline, in providing decent conditions for the sick and
wounded, as regards home leave, and so forth. Even the most
cultured and disciplined masses could not stand the slaughter, the
many years of slaughter, and so a period of absolute disintegration set in when even the advanced German army broke
down.

Evidently, there is a limit not only for Russia but for all
countries. There are different limits for different countries, but
for all of them there is a limit beyond which it is impossible to
continue to wage war for the sake of the interests of the
capitalists. This is what we see today.

German imperialism has completely exposed itself as a predator. The most important thing is that even in America and in
France, in these notorious democracies (the traitors to socialism,
the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, those hapless people
who call themselves socialists, are fond of chattering about
democracies), in these most advanced democracies of the world, in
these republics, imperialism is becoming more arrogant every day
and we find there beasts of prey more predatory than anywhere
else. They are plundering the world, fighting each other, and
arming against each other. This cannot be concealed for long. It
could be concealed when the war fever was at its height. But the
fever is subsiding, peace is approaching, and it is precisely in
these democracies that the masses see, in spite of all the lies
they are being told, that the war has led to fresh plunder, that
the most democratic republic is nothing more nor less than a
disguise for the most brutal and cynical predator who is ready to
ruin hundreds of millions of people in order to pay the debts,
that is, to pay the imperialist gentlemen, the capitalists, for
being good enough to allow the workers to cut each other’s
throats. This is becoming clearer to the masses every day.

It is this situation that makes possible political statements
such as the article written by the military correspondent of a
newspaper that belongs to the richest and most politically
experienced bourgeoisie, the London Times ; the author appraises events by saying that all over the world the armies are
breaking up and there is only one country where the army is being
built up, and that country is Russia.

The bourgeoisie—which militarily is far stronger than
Soviet Bolshevism—is compelled to admit this fact. And this
fact serves as a criterion of what we have accomplished in the
course of our Soviet activities in the past year.

We succeeded in reaching a turning-point where instead of an
army of ten million, the bulk of which had deserted, unable to
stand the horrors of war, and which had realised that this was a
criminal war, we began to build, one hundred thousand after
another, a socialist army, which knows what it is fighting for and
is ready to make greater sacrifices and suffer more privation than
under tsarism. For this army knows that it is fighting for its own
cause, for its own land, for its own power in the factories, that
it is defending the power of the working people, and that the
working people of other countries are awakening, slowly and with
great difficulty, but awakening nevertheless.

This is the situation that characterises the year’s experience of Soviet power.

War is an incredible hardship for Soviet Russia, war is an
incredible hardship for a people who for four years have borne the
horrors of the imperialist war. For Soviet Russia war is an
incredibly heavy burden. But at the present time even our powerful
enemies admit that their armies are cracking up, whereas our army
is being built. For the first time in history an army is being
built on the basis of the closest contact, inseverable contact,
coalescence, one might say, of the army and the Soviets. The
Soviets unite all the working people, all the exploited, and the
army is being built up for the purpose of socialist defence and on
the basis of class-consciousness.

An eighteenth-century Prussian monarch once wisely remarked:
“If our soldiers knew what we were fighting for, it would be
impossible to wage a single war.” That old Prussian monarch
was no fool. We, however, are prepared to say, comparing our
position with that of the monarch, that we can wage war because
the masses know what they are fighting for; and they want to fight
notwithstanding the incredible burdens—burdens, I repeat,
far greater than under tsarism—knowing that they are making
these desperate and incredibly heavy sacrifices in defence of
their socialist cause, fighting side by side with those workers of
other countries who are “disintegrating” and are beginning to understand our position.

Some foolish people are shouting about red militarism. These
are political crooks who pretend that they believe this absurdity
and throw charges of this kind right and left, exercising their
lawyers’ skill in concocting plausible arguments and in
throwing dust in the eyes of the masses. And the Mensheviks and
Socialist-Revolutionaries shout: “Look, instead of socialism, they are giving you red militarism!”

What a “horrible” crime, indeed! The imperialists of the whole world hurled themselves upon the Russian Republic in
order to crush it, and we began to form an army which for the
first time in history knows what it is fighting for and what it is
making sacrifices for, which is successfully contending against a
numerically superior enemy, and which with every month of its
resistance on an unprecedented scale is bringing nearer the world
revolution, and this is denounced as red militarism!

I repeat, these are either fools to whom no political appraisal can apply, or else political crooks.

Everybody knows that this war was forced upon us. We brought the
old war to a close at the beginning of 1918, and did not start a
new war. Everybody knows that the white guards attacked us in
the West, South and East, only because they were assisted by the
Entente, which scattered millions right and left. And these
advanced countries collected and handed over to the whiteguards
the vast stocks of war supplies and ammunition left over from
the imperialist war, for those gentlemen, the millionaires and
multimillionaires, know that their fate is being decided here,
that it is here they will perish if they do not crush us at
once.

The socialist, republic is straining every nerve, is making
sacrifices and winning victories. And if after a year of civil war
you look at the map and compare what Soviet Russia was in March
1918 and in July 1918—when the German imperialists in the
West occupied the line laid down by the Treaty of Brest, when the
Ukraine was under the heel of the German imperialists, when the
Czechoslovaks, bribed by the French and British, lorded it in the
East as far as Kazan and Simbirsk—if you look at the map
today, you will see that we have expanded immensely, that we have
won enormous victories.

Is this situation, only sordid and despicable political crooks
can use strong language and accuse us of red militarism.

Never in history has there been a revolution in which it was
possible to lay down one’s arms and rest on one’s laurels after the victory. Whoever thinks that such revolutions
are possible is not only no revolutionary, but the worst enemy of
the working class. There has never been a revolution, even a
second-rate one, even a bourgeois revolution in which the only
issue was the transfer of power from one propertied minority to
another. We know of examples! The French revolution, against which
the old powers hurled themselves at the beginning of the
nineteenth century in order to crush it, we call great precisely
because it succeeded in rousing the vast masses of the people in
defence of its gains and they resisted the whole world; this was
one of its greatest merits.

Revolutions are subjected to the most serious tests in the
fire of battle. If you are oppressed and exploited and think of
throwing off the power of the exploiters, if you are deter- mined
to carry this to its logical conclusion, you must under stand that
you will have to contend against the onslaught of the exploiters
of the whole world. If you are ready to offer resistance and to
make further sacrifices in order to hold out in the struggle, you
are a revolutionary; if not, you will be crushed.

This is how the question is presented by the history of all
revolutions.

The real test to which our revolution is being subjected is
that we, in a backward country, succeeded in capturing power
before the others, succeeded in establishing the Soviet form of
government, the power of the working and exploited people. Shall
we be able to hold, on at least until the masses in the other
countries make a move? If we are not prepared to make fresh
sacrifices and do not hold out, it will be said that our
revolution was historically unjustified. But democrats in
civilised countries who are armed to the teeth dread the presence
of a hundred or so Bolsheviks in a free republic with a hundred
million population, in the way America does. Bolshevism is so
infectious! And it turns out that the democrats cannot cope with a
hundred immigrants from starving, ruined Russia who might talk
about Bolshevism! The masses sympathise with us! The bourgeoisie
have only one path of salvation, and that is, while their hand
still grasps the sword, while they still control the guns, to turn
these guns against Soviet Russia and to crush her in a few months,
because later on nothing will crush her. This is the situation we
are in; this is what determined the military policy of the Council
of People’s Commissars during the past year; and this is
why, pointing to the facts, to the results, we have a right to say
that we have stood the test only because the workers and peasants,
though utterly exhausted by war, are creating a new army under
still more arduous conditions and are displaying new heroism.

That is a brief summary of the policy of the Soviet government
in the military field. Permit me to say just a few more words
about a matter in which military policy overlaps policy in another
field—economic policy. I refer to the military experts.

You are probably aware of the controversy that has arisen over
this question, and that some comrades, most devoted and convinced
Bolshevik Communists, often expressed vehement protests against
the fact that for the purpose of organising our socialist Red Army
we are utilising the services of the old military experts, tsarist
generals and officers, whose records are blemished by their
service to the tsar, and in some cases by the bloody acts of
repression against workers and peasants.

The contradiction here is glaring, and indignation, one might
say, springs up of its own accord. How can we build a socialist
army with the aid of tsarist experts?!

It turned out that this was the way, the only way, we did
build up an army. If we give some thought to the task that has
fallen to our lot, it will not be difficult to understand that it
is the only way we could build it. This is not only a military
matter, it is a task that confronts us in all spheres of everyday
life, and of the country’s economy.

The old utopian socialists imagined that socialism could be
built by men of a new type, that first they would train good, pure
and splendidly educated people, and these would build socialism. We always laughed at this and said that this was
playing with puppets, that it was socialism as an amusement for
young ladies, but not serious politics.

We want to build socialism with the aid of those men and women
who grew up under capitalism, were depraved and corrupted by
capitalism, but steeled for the struggle by capitalism. There are
proletarians who have been so hardened that they can stand a
thousand times more hardship than any army. There are tens of
millions of oppressed peasants, ignorant and scattered, but
capable of uniting around the proletariat in the struggle, if the
proletariat adopts skilful tactics. And there are scientific and
technical experts all thoroughly imbued with the bourgeois world
outlook, there are military experts who were trained under
bourgeois conditions—if they were only bourgeois it would
not be so bad, but there were also conditions of landed
proprietorship, serfdom and the big stick. As far as concerns the
economy, all the agronomists, engineers and school-teachers were
recruited from the propertied class; they did not drop from the
skies. Neither under the reign of Tsar Nicholas nor under the
Republican President Wilson were the propertyless proletarians at
the bench and the peasants at the plough able to get a university
education. Science and technology exist only for the rich, for the
propertied class; capitalism provides culture only for the
minority. We must build socialism out of this culture, we have no
other material. We want to start building socialism at once out of
the material that capitalism left us yesterday to be used today,
at this very moment, and not with people reared in hothouses,
assuming that we were to take this fairy-tale seriously. We have
bourgeois experts and nothing else. We have no other bricks with
which to build. Socialism must triumph, and we socialists and
Communists must prove by deeds that we are capable of building
socialism with these bricks, with this material, that we are
capable of building socialist society with the aid of proletarians
who have enjoyed the fruits of culture only to an insignificant
degree, and with the aid of bourgeois specialists.

If you do not build communist society with this material, you
will prove that you are mere phrase-mongers and windbags.

This is how the question is presented by the historical legacy
of world capitalism! This is the difficulty that confronted us
concretely when we took power, when we set up the Soviet machinery
of state!

This is only half the task, but it is the greater half. Soviet
machinery of state means that the working people are united in
such a way as to crush capitalism by the weight of their mass
unity. The masses did this. But it is not enough to crush
capitalism. We must take the entire culture that capitalism left
behind and build socialism with it. We must take all its science,
technology, knowledge and art. Without these we shall be unable to
build communist society. But this science, technology and art are
in the hands and in the heads of the experts.

This is the task that confronts us in all spheres. It is a
task with inherent contradictions, like the inherent contradictions of capitalism as a whole. It is a most difficult
task, but a practicable one. We cannot wait twenty years until we
have trained pure, communist experts, until we have trained the
first generation of Communists without blemish and without
reproach. No, excuse me, but we must build now, in two months and
not in twenty years’ time, so as to be able to fight the
bourgeoisie, to oppose the bourgeois science and technology of
the whole world. Here we must achieve victory. It is difficult to
make the bourgeois experts serve us by the weight of our masses,
but it is possible, and if we do it, we shall triumph.

When Comrade Trotsky informed me recently that the number of
officers of the old army employed by our War Department runs into
several tens of thousands, I perceived concretely where the secret
of using our enemy lay, how to compel those who had opposed
communism to build it, how to build communism with the bricks
which the capitalists had chosen to hurl against us! We have no
other bricks! And so, we must compel the bourgeois experts, under
the leadership of the proletariat, to build up our edifice with
these bricks. This is what is difficult; but this is the pledge of
victory.

Naturally, on this path, which is a new and difficult one, we
have made more than a few mistakes; on this path we have met with
more than a few reverses. Everybody knows that a certain number of
experts have systematically betrayed us. Among the experts in the
factories, among the agronomists, and in the administration, we
have seen and see today at every step a malicious attitude to
work, malicious sabotage.

We know that all this presents tremendous difficulties and
that we cannot achieve victory by violence alone. . . . We, of
course, are not opposed to violence. We laugh at those who are
opposed to the dictatorship of the proletariat, we laugh and say
that they are fools who do not understand that there must be
either the dictatorship of the proletariat or the dictatorship of
the bourgeoisie. Those who think otherwise are either idiots, or
are so politically ignorant that it would be a disgrace to allow
them to come anywhere near a meeting, let alone on the platform. The only alternative is either violence against
Liebknecht and Luxemburg, the murder of the best leaders of the
workers, or the violent suppression of the exploiters; and whoever
dreams of a middle course is our most harmful and dangerous
enemy. That is how the matter stands at present. Hence, when we
talk of utilising the services of the experts we must bear in mind
the lesson taught by Soviet policy during the past year. During
that year we have broken and defeated the exploiters and we must
now solve the prob- lem of using the bourgeois specialists. Here,
I repeat, violence alone will get us nowhere. Here, in addition to
violence, after successful violence, we need the organisation,
discipline and moral weight of the victorious proletariat, which
will subordinate all the bourgeois experts to its will and draw
them into its work.

Some people may say that Lenin is recommending moral persuasion instead of violence! But it is foolish to imagine that
we can solve the problem of organising a new science and
technology for the development of communist society by violence
alone. That is nonsense! We, as a Party, as people who have
learned something during this year of Soviet activity, will not be
so foolish as to think so, and we will warn the masses not to
think so. The employment of all the institutions of bourgeois
capitalist society requires not only the successful use of
violence, but also organisation, discipline, comradely discipline
among the masses, the organisation of proletarian influence over
the rest of the population, the creation of a new, mass
environment, which will convince the bourgeois specialists that
they have no alternative, that there can be no return to the old
society, and that they can do their work only in conjunction with
the Communists who are working by their side, who are leading the
masses, who enjoy the absolute confidence of the masses, and whose
object is to ensure that the fruits of bourgeois science and
technology, the fruits of thousands of years of the development of
civilisation, shall be enjoyed not by a handful of people for the
purpose of distinguishing themselves and amassing wealth, but by
literally all the working people.

This is an immensely difficult task, the fulfilment of which
will require decades! But to carry it out ,we must create a force,
a discipline, comradely discipline, Soviet discipline, proletarian
discipline, such as will not only physically crush the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie, but also encompass them
completely, subordinate them to our will, compel them to proceed
along our lines, to serve our cause.

I repeat that we come up against this problem every day is the
work of organising our military forces, in the work of economic
development, in the work of every economic council, in the work of
every factory committee and of every nationalised factory. There
was hardly a week during all past year that the Council of
People’s Commissars did not discuss and settle this question
in one way or another. I am sure that there was not a single
factory committee in Russia, not a single agricultural commune,
not a single state farm, not a single uyezd land department which
did not come up against this issue scores of times in the course
of the past year’s Soviet activity.

This is what makes this task so difficult, but it is also what
makes it a really gratifying one. This is what we must do now, the
day after the exploiters were crushed by the force of the
proletarian insurrection. We suppressed their resistance—this had to be done. But this is not the only
thing that has to be done. By the force of the new organisation,
the comradely organisation of the working people, we must compel
them to serve us. We must cure them of their old vices and prevent
them from relapsing into their exploiting practices. They have
remained bourgeois, and they occupy posts as commanders and staff
officers in our army, as engineers and agronomists, and these old,
bourgeois people call themselves Mensheviks and
Socialist-Revolutionaries. It does not matter what they call
themselves. They are bourgeois through and through, from head to
foot, in their outlook and in their habits.

Well, what shall we do, throw them out? You cannot throw out
hundreds of thousands! And if we did we should be harming only
ourselves. We have no other material with which to build communism
than that created by capitalism. We must not throw them out, but
break their resistance, watch them at every step, make no
political concessions to them, which spineless people are inclined
to do every minute. Educated people yield to the policy and
influence of the bourgeoisie because they acquired all their
education in a bourgeois environment and from that environment. That is why they stumble at every step and make
political concessions to the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie.

A Communist who says that he must not get into a state where
he will soil his hands, that he must have clean, communist hands,
and that he will build communist society with clean communist
hands and scorn the services of the contemptible, counter-revolutionary bourgeois co-operators, is a mere
phrase-monger, because we cannot help resorting to their
services.

The practical task that confronts us now is to enlist the
services of all those whom capitalism has trained to oppose
us, to watch them day after day, to place worker commissars
over them in an environment of communist organisation, day
after day to thwart their counter-revolutionary designs, and
at the same time to learn from them.

The science which we, at best, possess, is the science of the
agitator and propagandist, of the man who has been steeled by the
hellishly hard lot of the factory worker, or starving peasant, a
science which teaches us how to hold out for a long time and to
persevere in the struggle, and this has saved us up to now. All
this is necessary, but it is not enough. With this alone we cannot
triumph. In order that our victory may be complete and final we
must take all that is valuable from capitalism, take all its
science and culture.

How can we take it? We must learn from them, from our enemies. Our advanced peasants, the class-conscious workers in
their factories, our officials in the uyezd land departments must
learn from the bourgeois agronomists, engineers, and others, so as
to acquire the fruits of their culture.

In this respect, the struggle that flared up in our Party
during the past year was extremely useful. It gave rise to
numerous sharp collisions, but there are no struggles without
sharp collisions. As a result, however, we gained practical
experience in a matter that had never before confronted us but
without which it is impossible to achieve communism. I say again
that the task of combining the victorious proletarian revolution
with bourgeois culture, with bourgeois science and technology,
which up to now has been available to few people, is a difficult
one. Here, everything depends on the organisation and discipline
of the advanced sections of the working people. If, in Russia, the
millions of downtrodden and ignorant peasants who are totally
incapable of independent development, who were oppressed by the
landowners for centuries, did not have at their head, and by their
side an advanced section of the urban workers whom they
understood, with whom they were intimate, who enjoyed their
confidence, whom they believed as fellow-workers, if there were
not this organisation which is capable of rallying the masses of
the working people, of influencing them, of explaining to them and
convincing them of the importance of the task of taking over the
entire bourgeois culture, the cause of communism would be
hopeless.

I say this not from the abstract point of view, but from the
point of view of a whole year’s daily experience. Although
this experience includes a multitude of petty details, some times
dull and unpleasant, we must learn to see something deeper in
them. We must understand that these petty details, these conflicts
between, say, a factory committee and an engineer, a Red Army man
and some bourgeois officer, a peasant and a bourgeois agronomist—these conflicts, this friction, these petty
details contain much that is immeasurably deeper. We have
vanquished the prejudice that these bourgeois specialists should
be thrown out. We have taken over this machine, it is still
running badly, we have no illusions on that score; it keeps
stopping, it makes mistakes all the time, it runs into ditches,
and we drag it out again, but it is moving, and we shall keep it
on the right road. This is the only way we can emerge from this
quagmire of destruction, frightful difficulties, ruin, barbarism,
poverty and starvation into which we were dragged by the war, and
into which the imperialists of all countries are trying to push us
and keep us.

But we have begun to emerge, the first steps have been taken.

This year of Soviet activity has taught us clearly to understand the task in every individual case of work in the
factories and among the peasants, and we have mastered it. Soviet
power has gained tremendously by it in the past year, and it has
been worth while spending a year on it. We shall not, as we did in
the old days, discuss theoretically and in general terms the
importance of bourgeois specialists and the importance of
proletarian organisations, but at every step, in every factory
committee, and in every land organisation, we shall make use of
the experience we have gained. We have laid the foundation of our
Red Army, we now have a small foundation, we now have nationalised
factories where the workers understand their tasks and have begun
to increase labour productivity with the aid of bourgeois
specialists (who at every step are trying to turn to the past
while the mass organisations of the workers are compelling them to
march forward in step with Soviet power)—all this is a great
gain for Soviet power. This work is imperceptible, there is
nothing brilliant about it, it is difficult to appraise its real
value, but the very fact that from simply suppressing the
exploiters we have advanced to a phase where we are learning
ourselves and teaching the masses how to build communism with
capitalist bricks and compel the capitalist bourgeois specialists
to work for us, is a step forward for our movement. Only on this
road shall we achieve victory. And now we know that if we proceed
as we have been up to now we shall really achieve this victory.

Comrades, I now come to the last question that I want to deal
with, if only briefly, for I have already spoken too long. I have
in mind the question of our relations with the countryside.

Up to now I have spoken about our activities in the military
field, about the dictatorship, and about utilising the services
of bourgeois specialists. Now I want to deal with another great
difficulty that we encounter in our work of communist construction.

What is to be done if the proletariat has taken power in a
country where the urban proletariat constitutes a minority of
the population, while the majority are peasants accustomed to
work individually and deeply imbued with habits of individual
farming?

The majority of these peasants, however, have been so ruined,
impoverished and exhausted by the oppression of the landowners and
capitalists that they willingly render assistance to the
proletariat. When an urban worker approaches a peasant in a
reasonable way, tactfully, as man to man, and not as if he wants
to be a boss, which arouses legitimate hatred, he wins the
peasant’s most comradely confidence and complete support. We
know that this is a fact, and Soviet power in the villages is
based on it. Soviet power has been able to hold out only because
it has been receiving the sincere support of the majority of the
working people. We have been receiving this support because the
urban workers have established contact with the rural poor in
thousands of ways, of which we have not even an inkling.

The state, which formerly hindered the establishment of such
contacts, is now doing all it can to facilitate it. This alone
explains why Soviet power has been able to hold out and this is
the sole pledge of victory.

The enormous difficulties I have just referred to are due to
the peasants being accustomed to work individually and to sell
their grain freely. They think this is quite legitimate. They
argue as follows. How can it be that having worked so hard to
produce grain at the cost of so much sweat and blood, we have no
right to sell it as we please? The peasants consider themselves
the injured party.

But we know from the entire development of Russia that freedom
to trade means freely breeding capitalists; and freedom to trade
in a country which has been exhausted by starvation, where
starving people are prepared to give any thing, even to sell
themselves into slavery, for a crust of bread, freedom to trade
when the country is starving means allowing the minority freely to
amass wealth and ruin the majority.

We must prove that help for the peasantry is a primary task in
a country which has been exhausted by starvation; but we can help
the peasantry only by uniting their activities, by uniting the
masses, for the peasants are scattered, disunited and accustomed
to work and live out of contact with one another.

There are no objective obstacles to the fulfilment of this
difficult task. All that had to be done by means of force, has
been done; we do not reject force, for we know that there are
kulaks among the peasants who are actively resisting us and go to
the length of organising whiteguard revolts. This, however, does
not apply to peasants in the mass. The kulaks are a minority. As
far as they are concerned, the only thing to do is to fight them
and to keep on fighting them. They must be crushed, and we are
crushing them. But after the successful fulfilment of the task of
crushing the rural exploiters problems arise which cannot be
solved by the use of force. In this sphere, as in all the others,
we can fulfil our task only by means of mass organisation, by
means of the prolonged educational influence of the urban
proletariat over the peasantry.

Shall we succeed in this tasks? Yes, we know from experience
that we shall, and only because the vast majority of the
peasants have confidence in the workers’ government and on
the basis of this confidence in the workers we can reinforce the
foundation we have begun to build, and which we mustcontinue to
build, but only by means of comradely influence and discipline.

This is the practical task that now confronts us.

When we established the Poor Peasants Committees, [1] when we
tried to introduce barter with the rural districts, we did so not
to enable the rich peasants to obtain goods, but primarily to
enable the poor peasants to obtain the small quantities of goods
that the cities could provide so that by helping the poor we would
be able with their aid to beat the kulaks and take their surplus
grain.

It has been an extremely difficult task to supply grain to the
population of a vast country with poor transport facilities and a
scattered peasantry, and it has given us the most trouble. I
recall all the meetings of the Council of People’s
Commissars and must say that the Soviet government has not worked
so persistently on anything as it has on this. Our peasants are
extremely scattered and disunited. In the rural districts
ignorance and the habit of working individually are more deep
rooted than anywhere: The rural population is dissatisfied with
not being allowed freedom to trade in grain. And in this
situation, of course, political crooks, all sorts of
Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, incite the peasantry by
saying to them, “They are robbing you!”

There are scoundrels who after a year of Soviet activity when,
incidentally, food supply authorities have shown that during the
past few months we supplied the rural districts with 42,000
carloads of goods and received in exchange only 39,000 carloads of
grain—there are scoundrels, I say, who, after this come
along and yell, “Peasants, the Soviet government is robbing
you!”

At a time when the workers in the towns are on the verge of
exhaustion—and nowhere is there such terrible hunger as in
the towns and in the non-agricultural parts of Russia—when
the peasants have taken all the land and grain that belonged to
landowners, and when the bulk of the peasants, as we know, in the
first year of Soviet power worked for themselves and not for the
landowners and merchants and are now feeding better than they did
before, when the population of the urban and non-agricultural
districts of the country is starving and all the capitalists are
trying to crush us by famine, at such a time people wearing
Menshevik, Socialist- Revolutionary, or other clownish costumes,
have the insolence to shout, “They are robbing you!”
These people are agents of capitalism, and we must treat them as
such and nothing else!

At a time when the main difficulty confronting the Soviet
government is the famine, it is the duty of every Soviet citizen
to hand over all his surplus grain to the famine-stricken. This is
so clear and obvious, so intelligible to every working man, that
nobody can say a word against it. One must be a scoundrel, a
political crook, to obscure this plain, clear and obvious truth,
to make it unintelligible, or distort it!

It is on this truth that the urban workers rely. It is because
this truth is so obvious that they are able to do their extremely
difficult job. Up to now they have told the poor peasants that
they and the workers constitute the real bulwark of Soviet power,
that is why the working class has established Poor Peasants’
Committees, organised barter, and made it obligatory for the
co-operatives to include the whole population. All the decrees on
agriculture issued up to now have this main idea running through
them. And in all our appeals to the urban workers we have said,
“Unite with the rural poor, for unless you do, you will be
unable to solve the most important and most difficult problem,
namely, the bread problem.” And to the peasants we said,
“Either you unite with the urban workers, in which case we
shall triumph; or you allow yourselves to be misled by the
admonitions and exhortations of the capitalists and their servants
and flunkeys in Menshevik garb, who say, “Don’t let the towns rob you, trade as you please, the rich get richer, what
do you care if people are dying of starvation’, in which
case you yourselves will perish, you will become the slaves of the
capitalists and cause the ruin of Soviet Russia.” It was
only under capitalism that people argued, “I shall trade, I
shall get rich. Every man for himself and God for all.” This
was the principle of capitalism and it engendered war; that is why
the workers and peasants were poor, and an insignificant number of
people became multimillionaires.

The problem is how to approach the peasants in the course of
practical work, how to organise the poor and middle peasants so as
to be able at every step to combat their gravita- tion towards the
past, their attempts to go back to free trading activities, their
constant striving to be “free” producers. The word “freedom” is a good word. We meet it at every step:
freedom to trade, freedom to sell, freedom to sell one self, and
so forth. And there are Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries,
rascals, who garble and distort this beautiful word “freedom” in every newspaper and in every speech. But
these are all crooks, capitalism’s prostitutes, who are
trying to drag the people back to the past.

Lastly, the main object of the attention and activities of the Council of
People’s Commissars as well as of the Council of Defence has
recently, during the past few months and weeks, been the fight
against the famine.

The famine is particularly disastrous for us at the present
time, on the threshold of the spring; and the spring threatens to
be a most severe period for us. Just as last year the most severe
period was the end of winter, the spring and the beginning of the
summer, so, this year, we are now on the threshold of a severe
period. The whiteguards, landowners and capitalists have greater
hopes of being able to play on the famine as a means of crushing
Soviet power since they have been unable to do it in open
struggle.

The people who call themselves Mensheviks and Right or Left
Socialist-Revolutionaries have sunk so low that they claim to side
with the working people but when the food situation becomes more
acute and famine is approaching they try to take advantage of it
and incite the masses of the people against the workers’ and
peasants’ government. They do not understand that this sort
of policy today, this incitement and these attempts by the Left
Socialist-Revolutionaries to make capital out of the famine,
ostensibly for the benefit of the workers, are direct assistance
to the whiteguards, just as much as was the treachery of the Left
Socialist-Revolutionary Muravyov on the Eastern Front last year,
which cost the lives of tens of thousands of workers and
peasants. Any such agitation costs thousands more lives in the war
against the whiteguards. When Muravyov committed his act of
treachery last year, he opened up almost the entire front to the
enemy and caused us a number of severe reverses.

That is why I should like primarily and mainly to deal very
briefly with the major facts.

Although today our food situation has become worse, just as it
did last spring, we have every hope that we shall not only
overcome this difficulty but shall cope with it better than we
did last year. This hope is based on the fact that the situation
in the East and South has greatly improved; and the East and
South are the main granaries of Russia. At a number of meetings
of the Council of Defence and the Council of People’s
Commissars held during the past few days we ascertained very
definitely that about nine million poods of grain have been
piled up on the railways between Kazan and Saratov, and on the
Volga-Bugulma line, to the east of Samara, across the
Volga.

The great difficulty, and great danger, is that our railways
are in such a state of disrepair, and the shortage of locomotives
is so considerable, that we are not sure of being able to move all
this grain. This is what we have concentrated our main attention
and activities on during the past few days, and that is why we
resolved to resort to a measure like the suspension of all
passenger traffic from March 18 to April 10.

We know that this is a harsh measure. Agitators who are
helping the whiteguards will no doubt come along and shout,
“Look, the people are starving, and yet passenger traffic
has been stopped, to make it impossible to carry grain.”
Agitators of this type will certainly appear. But we tell
ourselves that in all cases of difficulty we rely on the
class-consciousness of the honest workers, and they will side with
us.

According to the calculations of the experts, the suspension
of passenger traffic will release 220 locomotives. These passenger
locomotives are less powerful than freight locomotives, they
cannot haul as much; but we have estimated that during this period
they will be able to haul about three and a half million poods of
grain. Individual food profiteers and the starving people who roam
all over the country in search of grain, would, at the most, be
able to carry half a million poods in such a period. This will be
confirmed by every experienced railway worker, by everybody, who
has been on the Trans-Volga line and has seen the grain heaped up,
sometimes right on the bare snow. The sacks of grain may be
damaged; as it is the grain is moist, and the situation will
become worse when the spring thaw commences. We therefore resorted
to this harsh measure, convinced that the truth cannot be
concealed from the vast masses of the workers, that the Left
Socialist-Revolutionaries will not succeed in misleading them,
that truth will prevail.

This harsh measure, the suspension of passenger traffic, will
provide us with several million poods of grain. We must brush
aside the lies, slander and fairy-tales to the effect that it is
harmful to suspend passenger traffic and say that with the
assistance of the Petrograd, Moscow and Ivanovo-Voznesensk workers
who are being sent to the South, it will provide a sufficient
quantity of grain. Incidentally, I will remind you that no city
has devoted so much effort to the organisation of food supplies as
Petrograd. All the best forces in that city have already been
mustered for the work, and this is what the workers in the other
advanced cities should do, too.

The socialist revolution cannot be accomplished without the
working class. It cannot be accomplished if the working class has
not accumulated sufficient forces to be able to lead the tens of
millions of exhausted, illiterate, and scattered rural people who
had been crushed by capitalism. Only the advanced workers can lead
them. But our best forces have already been used up, they are
weary and exhausted. Their places must be taken by average people
and young forces. Probably they will make mistakes, but that does
not matter so long as they are devoted to the workers’ cause, and so long as they have been brought up in the environment
of the proletarian struggle.

We have already taken measures to send our best forces to the
Volga-Bugulma Railway. Comrade Bryukhanov has gone there
accompanied by a group of workers. Army detachments accompanied by
workers have been sent to other lines, too, and, I repeat, there
are good grounds for hoping that we shall obtain grain. A severe
half-year lies ahead of us, but this will be the last severe
half-year, because instead of an enemy who is becoming stronger,
we have in front of us an enemy who is disintegrating, for the
Soviet movement is growing in all countries.

These are the grounds on which, after discussing the matter
most carefully and verifying our calculations again and again, we
say that the suspension of passenger traffic will enable us to
bring in several million poods of grain and use the extremely
rich granaries of the East and South. In the course of this severe
half-year we shall vanquish our chief enemy, the famine. Moreover,
our position today is much better than it was last year, because
we now have reserves.

Last yearthe Czechoslovaks reached Kazan and Simbirsk; the
Ukraine was under the heel of the Germans; Krasnov, financed by
the Germans, was mustering troops in the Don region, and we were
cut off from the South. Today the Ukraine is being liberated from
the German imperialists. The latter had planned to ship 60,000,000
poods of grain to Germany, but they shipped only 9,000,000 poods,
and with it something they cannot digest, namely, Bolshevism. This
is what upset the German imperialists, and this is what will upset
the French and British imperialists if it becomes possible for
them to advance farther into Russia.

We now have a Soviet Ukraine. And when it comes to supplying
us with grain, the Soviet Government of the Ukraine will not fix
its price like a huckster, a profiteer, or a muzhik who says,
“The starving will give me a 1,000 rubles a pood. To hell
with the state monopoly. All I want is to get rich. If the people
are starving, all the better, they will pay more.” This is
the way the rural bourgeoisie, the kulaks, the profiteers argue,
and they are being assisted by all those who agitate against the
state grain monopoly, by those who stand for “freedom” to trade, that is, freedom for the rich muzhik to amass wealth,
and freedom for the workers who are getting nothing to starve to
death. But the Ukrainian Government said, “Our first task is
to help the starving North. The Ukraine cannot hold out if the
North, which is exhausted by famine, does not hold out. The
Ukraine will hold out, and her victory will be certain, if she
helps the starving North.”

In the Ukraine there are huge stocks of grain. We cannot ship
it all at once. We have sent our best Soviet forces to the Ukraine
and already they all report in one voice that the stocks of grain
are enormous, but they cannot be dispatched all at once, we
haven’t the machinery for it. The Germans devastated the
Ukraine to such a degree that the machinery of administration must
be built entirely anew, and this has only just begun. Complete
chaos reigns there. The worst period, the first weeks at Smolny
after the October Revolu- tion when we were trying to overcome the
chaos, was nothing compared with the difficulties that are now
being experienced in the Ukraine. The Ukrainian comrades are
complaining bitterly about the lack of people, lack of forces with
which to build up the Soviet government. They have no machinery of
administration, they have no proletarian centre like Petrograd or
Moscow, for the Ukrainian proletarian centres are occupied by the
enemy. Kiev is not a proletarian centre. The Donets Basin,
exhausted by starvation, has not yet been liberated from the
Cossacks. Our Ukrainian comrades cry, “Workers of the North,
come to our assistance!”

And that is why we, on behalf of the Ukrainian comrades, say
to the Petrograd workers, knowing that they have done more than
the workers of any other city, “Do a little more, make another effort!” Now we can and must come to the aid of our
Ukrainian comrades, because they must build up the machinery of
the Soviet state on a site that was cleared and laid waste by
suffering as no other place has been!

We discussed the situation in the Central Committee of our
Party and gave instructions that everything should first be done
to help to build up administrative machinery in the Ukraine, and
in return for this, when this machinery is available, to set to
work to obtain 50,000,000 poods of grain by June 1.

I do not in the least wish to assert that this will be done. We all know that of all the tasks we undertook, not one was
fulfilled by the appointed date. Suppose only part of this task is
fulfilled; at all events you will know definitely that when things
get worse, when the famine here becomes more acute, and when the
food supply machinery will be working at top speed in the East and
South, we shall be able to obtain urgent aid from the South and
improve our situation.

In addition to the Ukraine, we have another source of grain
supply—the Don region. There, the victories of the Red Army
have already worked miracles. Several weeks ago the situation on
the Don, in the war against Krasnov, against our main enemy,
against the officers and Cossacks who received millions in bribes,
first from the Germans and then from the British and French, who
are still continuing to help them—several weeks ago, our
position was very serious. But now we have, with tremendous speed,
regained territory not only up to Tsaritsyn, but farther to the
south. The forces of Krasnov and the Don counter-revolutionaries
have been broken in spite of the assistance they received from the
imperialists.

What does this mean? It means that we are getting nearer to
coal and grain, for the lack of which we are perishing—owing
to the shortage of coal, the railways and factories are coming to
a standstill, and owing to the shortage of grain, the workers in
the towns, and in the non-agricultural districts generally, are
suffering the pangs of starvation.

In the Don area, as in the Ukraine, the grain stocks are
enormous. Furthermore, it cannot be said that there is no
administrative machinery in the Don area. In every military unit
there is a Communist group, worker commissars, and groups of food
supply workers. The greatest difficulty there is that neither of
the two main railway lines can be used because the whiteguards, on
retreating, blew up the bridges.

The last meeting of the Council of Defence and the Council of
People’s Commissars was attended by experts whom we asked
how material could be obtained to repair the lines, and how at
least one of them could be repaired. At the last meeting of the
Council of Defence we were able to assure ourselves that thanks to
an enormous exertion of effort not only were materials provided,
but the comrades on the spot assured us, almost guaranteed, that
both lines would be repaired before the spring thaw. The
resumption of traffic on these two lines is perhaps worth many
victories over the Cossacks and enables us to say that we must
hold on for another few severe months, we must strain every nerve,
obtain the assistance of the Petrograd, Moscow and
Ivanovo-Voznesensk workers. In addition to the East, from where it
is difficult to ship anything, in addition to the Ukraine, where
there are vast stocks but no administrative machinery, we have the
Don region, which has been reconquered by the Red Army. That is
why we cautiously, after cool calculation, after verifying all
this by means of repeated reports and communications from the
people on the spot and hearing the statements of food supply and
railway experts, say that we have very good grounds for believing
that we can not only hold out as we held out last year, but also
greatly improve our conditions.

Our internal enemy is collapsing, and our external enemy cannot
possibly hold out for long. Comrades, we were particularly
convinced of this by what we heard from our foreign comrades who
arrived here, and jointly with whom we recently formed the
Communist International in Moscow. In Paris, speakers at public
meetings who attack Bolshevism are driven from the platform. Yes, victory will be ours! The imperialists may yet
shed the blood of thousands and thousands of workers, murder
Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, and hundreds of the best
representatives of the International, they may fill the prisons
in Britain, France, Germany and Italy with socialists, but this
will not avail them! Victory will be ours! For in spite of all
the lies and the torrents of abuse and filthy slander that are
poured out against us, the workers of all countries now
understand what is meant by Soviets, by Soviet power. The
capitalists of no country have a way out. I repeat that when
they conclude peace they will be at loggerheads. France is ready
to hurl herself upon Italy, they are quarrelling over the
division of the booty. Japan is arming against America. They
have imposed upon the peoples an incredible burden of tribute,
millions upon millions of war debts. But everywhere the people
are exhausted by war, everywhere there is a shortage of food,
industry is at a stand still, and starvation reigns. The
Entente, which is promising right and left to help the counter-revolutionaries, cannot feed its own countries. The
masses of the workers in Paris, in London and in New York have
translated the word “Soviet” into their own languages, they have made it intelligible for every worker, for
they know that the old bourgeois republic cannot help their
cause, that only a workers’ government can help them.

Soviet Russia encounters enormous difficulties because the
military forces of the most well-armed and most powerful countries
of the world have been hurled against her. In spite of this,
Soviet power in Russia has succeeded in winning the sympathy, the
attention and moral support of the workers of the world. And on
the basis of these facts, not exaggerating in the least, and not
shutting our eyes to the fact that in Germany and in other
countries workers’ blood is flowing and many of the best
socialist leaders are being brutally done to death—we know
this and do not shut our eyes to it—we assert that victory,
complete victory, will be ours, because the power of the
imperialists in the other countries has been shaken, while the
workers are emerging from their state of stultification and
deception. Soviet power has already won recognition from the
workers of all countries. Everywhere the Soviets, the capture of
power by the workers themselves, are regarded as the only
hope.

And when the workers learn that the united workers even in an
underdeveloped and backward country, after capturing power, have
succeeded in creating a force that is resisting the imperialists
of the whole world, when they learn that these workers have
succeeded in taking the factories from the capitalists and in
giving to the peasants the land that formerly belonged to the
landowners—when this truth reaches the masses of workers of
all countries, we shall be able once again to say loudly, and with
firm conviction, that our victory on a world scale is assured, for
the power of the bourgeoisie has been shaken, it will no longer
succeed in deceiving the workers, for the Soviet movement has
sprung up everywhere. And iust as we saw the birth of the Soviet
Republic on October 25, 1917, and the birth of the Third,
Communist International a few days ago in Moscow, so we shall soon
see the birth of a World Soviet Republic. ( The speech was interrupted by applause and ended in an ovation. )

I should very much like the Petrograd comrades to print the
following as a foreword or afterword to my speech, even if only in small type.

April 17

Lenin

Afterword [2]

After spending no little effort in correcting the verbatim
report of my speech, I am compelled to make the following urgent
request to all comrades who want to report my speeches for the
press.

My request is that they should never rely on the shorthand or
any other verbatim reports of my speeches, never make any
endeavour to obtain such reports, and never publish such reports
of my speeches.

Instead of publishing the shorthand reports of my speeches let
them, if necessary, publish summaries of them. I have seen
newspaper summaries of my speeches that were satisfactory; but I
have never seen a single verbatim report of my speeches that was
at all satisfactory. Whether this is due to the fact that I speak
too fast, or that I do not construct my sentences properly, or to
some other reason, I will not undertake to say; but the fact
remains that I have never seen a single satisfactory shorthand, or
any other verbatim report of my speeches.

A good summary of a speech is better than a bad verbatim
report. That is why I request that no verbatim report of my
speeches should ever be published.

April 17, 1919

N. Lenin

Endnotes

[1]
Poor Peasants’ Committees were set up during the spring and summer of 1018; the poor peasants in the villages
united to fight for Soviet power against the kulaks who were
organising counter-revolutionary acts and attempting to prevent
the supply of fodd to the hungry towns. A decree of the All-Russia
Central Executive Committee of June 11, 1918 defined the work of
the Committees as; the distribution of grain, farm implements and
articles of primary necessity and aid to the local food supply
organisations in requisitioning grain surpluses from the
kulaks. The decree granted various privileges to the poor peasants
in the distribution of grain and farn implements.

The Poor Peasants’ Committees were the main support of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the
countryside where they helped strengthen Soviet power and attract
the middle peasants to its side.

The Extraordinary Sixth All-Russia Congress of
Soviets (November 1918) passed a decision to merge the Committees
with the village Soviets since they had served ’the purpose
for which they were set up.

[2]
Lenin ’s request notwithstanding, this Afterword was not
published in 1919 through the fault of Zinoviev; it was first
published in 1922.