V. I.

Lenin

Speech at the Fourth Conference of Gubernia Extraordinary Commissions [1]

February 6, 1920

Comrades, you will now have to carry on your work under
conditions when Soviet Russia is passing to a new phase of activities. You
all know, of course, that these conditions of the transition period are due
both to international and internal conditions, or rather to the changed situation both on the international and home fronts that has taken place
recently.

The fundamental change is that the main forces of the whiteguard
counter-revolution have been smashed after the defeat of Yudenich and
Kolchak and after the victory over Denikin. We have to be cautious, though,
since a hitch has recently occurred near Rostov and at Novocherkassk, and
there is a danger that Denikin may recover. Nevertheless, the main
victories create a new situation. Obviously, the bourgeoisie cannot
seriously count on things taking a turn in their favour, all the more as
the international situation, too, has changed greatly, changed to such an
extent that the Entente has been obliged to lift the blockade. We have been
able to conclude peace with Estonia. In this respect we have achieved a
basic success which has greatly strengthened our position, and we shall
probably secure peace with all the other border states, and then an
invasion by the Entente will practically be ruled out.

Thus, the first acute moment of our struggle with the counter-revolution, with the whiteguard armed force, both overt and
covert-this first acute period is apparently passing. It is more than
likely, however, that attempts at one or another counter-revolutionary
movement and revolt will be repeated, and, besides, the experience of the
Russian revolutionary movement shows that attempts of a purely terrorist
nature are often accompanied by a mass armed struggle, and therefore it is
natural to expect that the counter-revolutionary armed officer force-an
element probably most accustomed to handling and using arms-will not miss a
chance to make use of these arms for their own ends.

So though the death sentence, after the capture of Rostov, has been
abolished on Comrade Dzerzhinsky’s initiative, a reservation was made at
the very beginning that we do not by any means close our eyes to the
possibility of restoring capital punishment. With us this is a matter of
expediency. It goes without saying that the Soviet government will not keep
the death penalty longer than is absolutely necessary, and by doing away
with it, has taken a step that no democratic government of any bourgeois
republic has ever taken.

You are aware that the great majority of the workers and peasants in
all the outlying districts, who were under the yoke of the whiteguards,
have come over to our side. The longer they were under that yoke the more
strongly have they sided with us. And so we know that all the attempts of
the bourgeoisie are doomed to failure. But that these attempts are
possible, we know only too well from the two years’ experience of Soviet
power. We have seen tens of thousands of officers, landowner elements,
stopping. at no crimes, concluding agreements with the agents of
imperialist foreign powers to blow up bridges. And we say that attempts
like these will go on. With due consideration for the new general position
of the state, we must nevertheless remain alert and remember that though
the period of armed struggle on a big historical scale is coming to end, we
must on no account exclude the possibility of our having to keep in a state
of preparedness.

The problem set before. the agencies of suppression of the
counter-revolution, before the agencies of the Cheka, and still facing them
today, is a complex and difficult one. On the one hand, they must realise
and make allowance for the transition from war to peace, and, on the other,
they must be on guard all the time, since we do not know how long it will
take to secure a lasting peace; we must take into account what effect this
new approach will have on the bourgeois sections of the population, we must
bear in mind, test in practice what these changes will yield, and only
after all this has been taken into consideration, introduce one or another
modification on the basis of such practical experience.

In a word, we must continue to keep fighting fit to be able to repulse
the enemy. There may possibly be attempts at invasion, Denikin may possibly
fortify his position to continue the civil war, there may possibly be
attempts at terror on the part of groups of counter-revolutionaries, and it
is our duty to be always in fighting trim. While keeping in fighting trim,
keeping the apparatus for suppressing the resistance of the exploiters
alerted, we must take into account the new transition from war to peace and
gradually change our tactics, change the nature of repressive
measures.

This question, I believe, played no small part in your discussions, and
you, of course,, have much more to go on than I have in the matter of
practical concrete decisions. I have no doubt that you will try to study
this material in a concrete, practical way. You must work out in what
direction the agencies for suppressing the counter-revolution are to modify
their activities in the recently liberated parts of Russia, in Siberia and
the Ukraine, how, in keeping with this, we are to change our activities. I
shall not go into details or enlarge on this, because I have not had a
chance to study the factual material, but I repeat-the important thing is
to take into account the concrete facts that have come to light in the work
of every Cheka. Moreover, the aim of such conferences is to enable you to
discuss the factual material in greatest possible detail, so that local
workers should not shut themselves up in their own narrow circle, but
should be able, as a result of such an exchange of opinions, to devise more
durable and lasting tactics.

I should like in particular to draw attention to a question that now
confronts the agencies of suppression of the counter-revolution, the
agencies combating espionage and profiteering, namely, to the bloodless
front of labour, a question that is now becoming a key issue in the
building up of Soviet power, in the strengthening of the workers’ and
peasants’ rule and the revival of the ruined economy.

You know that the task of fighting Kolchak, Yudenich and Denikin, who
have been supported by the Entente, the task of fighting the
counter-revolutionary landowners and capitalists who were convinced up till
now that their victory was secure, since the wealthiest Powers in the world
were on their side-this task called for an exertion of all the country’s
strength, because the very existence of the Soviet Republic was at
stake.

During these two years Soviet power can be said to have accomplished
what is nothing short of a miracle, for in the struggle against
international capital we have succeeded in winning such an incredible, such
an amazing victory as the world has never known. This has happened because
all our forces were closely united, because we had a real dictatorship of
the proletariat in action in the sense that the vanguard, the best advance
guard of the working class during these two years of Soviet government displayed unheard-of heroism
and determination, while all the vacillating elements among the less
developed section of the working class and the peasantry, who went through
a long range of fluctuations, found themselves leaning more and more to our
side. The more trials they went through, the sooner did they side with
us.

To achieve such a concentration of forces we had to resort to measures
of coercion in face of all the lamentations, regrets and complaints. Both
before and after the October Revolution we held the view that the birth of
a new order was impossible without revolutionary coercion, that all the
regrets and complaints that we hear from non-Party petty-bourgeois
intellectuals are simply reactionary. History, which is propelled by a
fierce class struggle, has shown that when the landowners and capitalists
felt that it was a question of the last decisive fight, they stopped at
nothing.

History has shown that without revolutionary coercion victory cannot be
achieved. Without revolutionary coercion directed against the avowed
enemies of the workers and peasants, it is impossible to break down the
resistance of these exploiters. On the other hand, revolutionary coercion
is bound to be employed towards the wavering and unstable elements among
the masses themselves.

Today we are witnessing the tremendous victory of the Red Army, but if
we look back over the last two years of Soviet government and think of how
we advanced towards these victories, we are bound to remember that the
October Revolution started when the army was completely demoralised and
there was a complete absence of any military organisation. We had no army,
and were obliged to scrape one together, to weld, muster and build this
army up anew by long hard work. And in building up this new disciplined Red
Army we had to resort to revolutionary coercion. And this revolutionary
coercion was quite rightly applied to self-seeking elements. At a time when
the advanced section of the population were giving all their strength to
the fight against the counter-revolution, at a time when thousands of them,
with the greatest self-sacrifice, were laying down their lives on the
fields of battle, the backward elements among the peasantry, who had
received land, and the backward elements among the workers, were working only for themselves. At
that time the advanced elements had to build up and strengthen the new
discipline, which was maintained by revolutionary coercion and which could
be so maintained only because the public-spirited section of the workers
and peasants, of all the working masses, sympathised with this coercion,
realised that without this iron discipline we could not have built up the
Red Army, could not have held our own in the two years of struggle and
generally could not have stood up against organised and united capital. In
this respect, the tasks of cultivating discipline, maintaining discipline
and rallying our forces to face the coming struggle-these tasks are now
gradually being modified. At first we gave all our forces to the war, all
the forces of the ruined country. This condemned the country to still
greater ruin.

No one believed two years ago that Russia, a country ravaged by four
years of imperialist war, could withstand another two years of civil
war. In fact, if we were asked at the end of October 1917 whether we would
survive two years of civil war against the world’s bourgeoisie, I doubt
whether many of us would have answered in the affirmative. Events, however,
have shown that the energy which the worker and peasant masses developed
proved to be greater than the people who had made the October Revolution
believed. As a result, we have received-and the home fronts have shown us-a
source of new strength considerably greater than anything we had counted
on. At the same time this source has shown that the Red Army, which is
capable of winning victories on the war fronts, is meeting with new
obstacles on the home fronts-this is particularly the case in transport. Of
course, things are bad with us as regards food, too, cold and hunger are
worse than ever now, but with the liberation of the richest grain-producing
gubernias the food situation is improving, and our chief crisis now is
transport. It should be said that the same crisis exists in all the richest
countries, who have never experienced such a long war. Even these countries
are suffering from a shortage of railway cars. So you can imagine what is
happening with us in Russia, who has been at war six years and had had her
bridges and locomotives deliberately destroyed.

Our position, in this respect, is a very difficult one, of course, and
the task of the Cheka’s transport departments, of their whole organism, the
efforts of all the revolutionary social-minded masses, are aimed at helping
the country to extricate itself from this critical plight, which without
exaggeration can be said to verge on catastrophe. Another thing to be borne
in mind is that the state of the railways in February, what with the winter
snowdrifts, is always worse, even during ordinary times, than at any other
season. At present our transport crisis has reached a stage when the
railways are threatened with a complete stoppage. Lately, Moscow has had
only a three-day supply of bread, while dozens of trains have been held up
through lack of fuel.

We are well aware of the methods for coping with this disastrous
situation, which we have been using during two years of war. These methods
are-raising the social consciousness of the masses and appealing directly
to them. In every such crisis we deemed it our duty to appeal to the worker
and peasant masses and describe to them the difficult situation that had
arisen. We appealed to them and pointed out on whom the salvation of Soviet
Russia depended and what effort was needed to concentrate on a single
definite task. These tasks often changed while Soviet power was engaged in
fighting its enemies, and a proper understanding of the state’s position
depends upon the ability to grasp what tasks have to be tackled in order to
cope with the economic chaos and pass on to the normal work of economic
organisation. Now, too, you know that most attention was given to
explaining the critical position of the railways to the workers and
peasants. A tremendous effort is needed here on the part of the proletariat
and the peasantry. Such a thing as the delivery of fuel is a difficult
problem, which cannot possibly be coped with unless the worker and peasant
population give themselves to the task with enthusiasm, unless there is a
spurt of collective mass effort such as we witnessed during the best period
of the Red Army’s victories. Today, for example, the delivery of fuel and
the clearing of railway tracks meet with difficulties arising from the fact
that the peasants were given a number of promises to compensate them for
their food products. Naturally, deliveries require draft horses, and the peasants out there are unable to
provide these, they are very unwilling and unfriendly, as they do not
receive compensation in the way of a definite amount of goods; and we,
owing to the almost complete stoppage of transport, are not in a position
to give them any commodities worth speaking of. We say that the peasants
should do this as a loan to their workers’ and peasants’ state in order to
save the starving workers and put industry on its feet. The peasants should
give this loan, because, for instance, in some places the peasantry are
suffering terribly from a shortage of salt, while we have enormous stocks
of this salt which we are unable to deliver since the railways do not cope
with the task of transporting the absolutely essential amount of
breadstuffs.

We have here a situation that calls for still greater discipline, for
propaganda and agitation to educate and unite all the workers and
peasants. The use of revolutionary coercion turns this discipline into
something real and definite, showing that the class-conscious working class
has set itself a definite practical task, which we shall see through to its
conclusion. Just as in the period of our most difficult struggle against
Yudenich, Kolchak and Denikin, when we advanced Communists, leading
workers, to the front ranks, made great sacrifices, giving the lives of our
best fighters and at the same time building up discipline and punishing
self-seekers-we achieved the maximum exertion of the people’s energy, and
we won; so today, too, we must set ourselves the same aim and achieve it at
all costs by the same methods if we are to save transport.

We have grain, salt, we have sufficient quantities of raw materials and
fuel, we can put industry back on its feet, but this will take months of
hard efforts, and in these efforts the agencies of the Cheka must become an
instrument for carrying out the centralised will of the proletariat, an
instrument of discipline such as we succeeded in creating in the Red
Army.

And I am sure that after this meeting, in the practical work of your
agencies, and here, too,. you will come to an understanding of the role the
uyezd transport departments of the Cheka are to play, of the way they
should organise their work, how they should advance new people from their midst in order to fight the profiteers and saboteurs, who are more numerous
among the railwaymen than anywhere else. This is a task of your practical
experience, a task you will have to carry out by way of an exchange of
opinions. The railways are notable in that we have there a majority of
workers on a working-class level and a minority who engage in profiteering,
and here it is the task of the Transport Cheka to secure a correct division
of labour, responsibility for economising labour power, and secure all this
through the efforts of the communist elements among the railwaymen. Only by
relying on these best masses shall we he able to create a force that will
cope with profiteers and gain the upper hand over these elements,
recruited during the worst days of tsarism. To overcome this force
inherited by us from capitalism we have one means-that of tightening
discipline and developing revolutionary energy to the utmost. The Cheka
should rely on the communist groups, on the trade unions—combine its work
with propaganda and agitation, evoke among the bulk of the railwaymen a
conscious attitude towards this struggle.

And I am sure that by strict organisation and with our previous
experience to go on, we shall achieve in our work results as good as those
we achieved in the armed struggle.

( Loud, continuous applause .)

---
Notes:
[1]
The Speech at the Fourth Conference of Guberna Extraordinary Commissions was delivered by Lenin at the morning plenary session on
February 6, 1920. The conference was called at a time when the Soviet
Republic, having defeated Kolchak, Denikin and Yudenich, had gained a
temporary respite and was in a position to tackle its economic
problems.

The conference was attended by 69 voting delegates and
7 delegates with a consultative voice. All the delegates were Communists,
the majority of the 69 voting delegates having joined the Party long before
the revolution. Most of the delegates were workers.