# Comrades, Workers! Let Us Advance to the Final, Decisive Battle!
Source: PSS vol 37

The Soviet Republic is encircled by enemies. Yet it will vanquish both external and internal foes. We are already witnessing a rising tide among the working masses—a tide that ensures victory. The sparks and explosions of the revolutionary conflagration in Western Europe are growing ever more frequent, filling us with confidence in the imminent triumph of the international workers’ revolution.

The external enemy of the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic is, at this very moment, Anglo-French and Japanese–American imperialism. This enemy is now advancing upon Russia; it plunders our lands, seizing Archangelsk and—according to French newspapers—pushing as far as Nikolsk-Ussuriysky from Vladivostok. This enemy has bribed the generals and officers of the Czechoslovak Corps. It attacks peaceful Russia with the same bestial ferocity and predatory greed that the Germans displayed in February—though with one crucial distinction: the Anglo-Japanese do not seek merely to seize and plunder Russian soil; they aim to overthrow Soviet power in order to “restore the front,” that is, to draw Russia once again into the imperialist (to put it simply: bandit-like) war between England and Germany.

The Anglo-Japanese capitalists wish to restore the rule of landowners and capitalists in Russia—so that they may share the spoils of war, enslave Russian workers and peasants to Anglo-French capital, extract exorbitant interest on loans amounting to billions, and extinguish the fire of the socialist revolution that has begun among us and increasingly threatens to spread across the globe.

The first page of V. I. Lenin’s manuscript, “Comrades, Workers: Let Us Advance to the Final, Decisive Battle!”—early August 1918 (reduced in size).

The beasts of Anglo-Japanese imperialism do not possess the strength to occupy and subjugate Russia. Even neighboring Germany lacks such strength—as its “experience” in Ukraine has amply demonstrated. The Anglo-Japanese had hoped to catch us off guard. But they failed. The workers of Petrograd, followed by those of Moscow—and after Moscow, the entire industrial heartland—are rising up with ever greater unity, ever greater determination, in ever larger numbers, and with ever more selfless resolve. In this lies the guarantee of our victory.

The Anglo-Japanese capitalist predators, as they march against peaceful Russia, also count on their alliance with the internal enemy of Soviet power. We know full well who this internal enemy is: the capitalists, the landowners, the kulaks, their offspring—those who hate the power of workers and toiling peasants, peasants who refuse to drink the blood of their fellow villagers.

A wave of kulak uprisings is sweeping across Russia. The kulak hates Soviet power with a furious, unbridled hatred and is ready to slaughter and strangle hundreds of thousands of workers. Had the kulaks succeeded in their bid for victory, we know full well that they would have mercilessly slaughtered hundreds of thousands of workers—joining forces with landowners and capitalists, reinstating penal servitude for workers, abolishing the eight-hour workday, and returning factories and mills to the yoke of the capitalists.

This is how it always was in previous European revolutions: when, due to the weakness of the workers, the kulaks managed to turn back from the republic and reestablish monarchy; to reverse the power of the toiling masses and restore the absolute dominion of exploiters, of the rich, of the idle. We saw this unfold before our very eyes in Latvia, in Finland, in Ukraine, in Georgia. Everywhere, the greedy, overfed, beastly kulaks joined hands with landowners and capitalists against the workers—and against the poor in general. Everywhere, the kulaks dealt with the working class with an unprecedented thirst for blood. Everywhere, they formed alliances with foreign capitalists against the workers of their own country. This is how the Cadets, the Right Socialist-Revolutionaries, and the Mensheviks have acted—and continue to act; one need only recall their exploits in “Czechoslovakia”{21}. And this is how the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries behave—through sheer folly and moral weakness—whose rebellion in Moscow actually aided the White Guards in Yaroslavl, the Czechoslovaks and the Whites in Kazan; not without reason did these Left SRs earn the praise of Kerensky and his friends, the French imperialists.

There can be no doubt: the kulaks are the most furious enemies of Soviet power. Either the kulaks will slaughter countless workers—or the workers will mercilessly crush the uprisings of the kulak, predatory, minority segment of the people that rises up against the power of the toiling masses. There can be no middle ground here. Peace is out of the question: one may easily reconcile a kulak with a landowner, a tsar, or a priest—even if they have fallen out—but never with the working class.

And so we call the struggle against the kulaks the final, decisive battle. This does not mean that there cannot be repeated kulak uprisings, nor that foreign capitalism cannot launch multiple campaigns against Soviet power. The term “final” battle signifies that this is the last—and the largest—of the exploitative classes to rise up against us within our own country.

The kulaks are the most brutal, the most coarse, the most savage exploiters—classes that have repeatedly restored the rule of landowners, tsars, priests, and capitalists in the histories of other nations. There are more kulaks than landowners and capitalists. Yet even so, the kulaks remain a minority within the people.

Let us assume that in Russia we have roughly 15 million peasant farming households, reckoning the former Russia—before the predators tore Ukraine and other territories away from it. Of these 15 million, perhaps around 10 million are impoverished peasants, eking out a living by selling their labor power, falling into debt bondage to the wealthy, or lacking surplus grain—and especially those who have been utterly ruined by the burdens of war. About 3 million may be counted as middle peasants, while no more than 2 million can be regarded as kulaks, the wealthy landowners and grain speculators. These bloodsuckers profited from the people’s dire need during the war; they amassed thousands upon thousands of rubles by driving up the prices of grain and other commodities. These spiders fattened themselves at the expense of war‑devastated peasants, at the expense of starving workers. These leeches drained the lifeblood of the toiling masses, growing ever richer the more the workers in the cities and factories went hungry. These vampires have seized—and continue to seize—large tracts of landed property from the hands of the landlords, repeatedly plunging poor peasants into debt bondage.

A merciless war against these kulaks! Death to them! Hatred and contempt for the parties that shield them: the Right Socialist-Revolutionaries, the Mensheviks, and the current Left Socialist-Revolutionaries! The working class must crush, with an iron hand, the uprisings of the kulaks—those who ally themselves against the toilers of their own country with foreign capitalists.

The kulaks exploit the darkness, fragmentation, and scattered nature of the rural poor. They incite the peasantry against the workers; sometimes they bribe the peasants, offering them a few hundred rubles to “make a little profit” from grain speculation (while simultaneously plundering the poor for tens of thousands). The kulaks strive to win over the middle peasants—and on occasion, they succeed.

But the working class is under no obligation to part ways with the middle peasants. The working class cannot make peace with the kulak; yet with the middle peasants, it can—and does—seek and pursue agreements. The workers’ government—the Bolshevik government—has proven this not in words, but in deeds.

We demonstrated this when we adopted and rigorously enforced the law on “the socialization of land”; this law contains numerous concessions to the interests and outlooks of the middle peasants.

We proved it again when we raised bread prices threefold just recently{22}, for we fully recognize that the earnings of the middle peasant often fail to keep pace with current prices for industrial goods—and that these earnings must be increased.

Every conscious worker will explain this to the middle peasants and, with patience, persistence, and repeated effort, will demonstrate to them that socialism is infinitely more beneficial for the middle peasant than the rule of tsars, landlords, and capitalists.

The workers’ power has never wronged the middle peasant—and never will. But the power of the tsars, landlords, capitalists, and kulaks has always not only wronged the middle peasant, but directly stifled, plundered, and ruined him—in every country, without exception, including Russia.

The closest possible alliance and complete fusion with the rural poor; concessions and agreements with the middle peasants; the ruthless suppression of the kulaks—these bloodsuckers, these vampires, these robbers of the people, these speculators who profit from famine—such is the program of the conscious worker. Such is the policy of the working class.

Written in the first half of August, after the 6th, 1918.

First published on January 17, 1925, in the newspaper “Workers’ Moscow,” No. 14.

Printed from manuscript.