V. I.

Lenin

Letters From Afar

FIFTH Letter

The Tasks Involved in the Building of the Revolutionary Proletarian State

In the preceding letters, the immediate tasks of the revolutionary proletariat in Russia were formulated as follows:
(1) to find the surest road to the next stage of the revolution, or to the
second revolution, which (2) must transfer political power from the government of the land lords and
capitalists (the Guchkovs, Lvovs, Milyukovs, Kerenskys) to a government of
the workers and poorest peasants.
(3) This latter government must be organised on the model of the Soviets of
Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies, namely, (4) it must smash, completely eliminate, the old state machine, the army,
the police force and bureaucracy (officialdom), that is common to
all bourgeois states, and substitute for this machine (5) not only a mass organisation, but a universal organisation of the
entire armed people.
(6) Only such a government, of “such” a class composition
(“revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and
peasantry”) and such organs or government (“proletarian militia”)
will be capable of successfully carrying out the extremely
difficult and absolutely urgent chief task of the moment, namely:
to achieve peace , not an imperialist peace, not a deal between the
imperialist powers concerning the division of the booty by the capitalists
and their governments, but a really lasting and democratic peace, which
cannot be achieved without a proletarian revolution in a number of
countries.
(7) In Russia the victory of the proletariat can be achieved in the very
near future only if, from the very first step, the workers are supported by
the vast majority of the peasants fighting for the confiscation of the
landed estates (and for the nationalisation of all the land, if we assume
that the agrarian programme of the “104” is still essentially the
agrarian programme of the peasantry [2] ).
(8) In connection with such a peasant revolution, and on its basis, the
proletariat can and must, in alliance with the poorest section of
the peasantry, take further steps towards control of the
production and distribution of the basic products, towards the introduction
of “universal labour service”, etc. These steps are dictated, with
absolute inevitability, by the conditions created by the war, which in many
respects will become still more acute in the post-war period. In their
entirety and in their development these steps will mark the transition to socialism , which cannot be achieved in Russia directly, at one
stroke, without transitional measures, but is quite achievable and urgently
necessary as a result of such transitional measures.
(9) In this connection, the task of immediately organising special Soviets
of Workers’ Deputies in the rural districts , i.e., Soviets of
agricultural wage-workers separate from the Soviets of the other
peasant deputies, comes to the fore front with extreme urgency.

Such, briefly, is the programme we have outlined, based on an appraisal
of the class forces in the Russian and world revolution, and also on the
experience of 1871 and 1905.

Let us now attempt a general survey of this programme as a whole and,
in passing, deal with the way the subject was approached by K. Kautsky, the
chief theoretician of the “Second” (1889–1914) International and most
prominent representative of the “Centre”, “marsh” trend that is now to
be observed in all countries, the trend that oscillates between the
social-chauvinists and the revolutionary inter nationalists. Kautsky
discussed this subject in his magazine Die Neue Zeit of April 6,
1917 (new style) in an article entitled, “The Prospects of the Russian
Revolution”.

“ First of all,” writes Kautsky, “we must ascertain what tasks
confront the revolutionary proletarian regime” (state system).

“ Two things,” continues the author, “are urgently needed by the
proletariat: democracy and socialism.”

Unfortunately, Kautsky advances this absolutely incontestable thesis in
an exceedingly general form, so that in essence he says nothing and
explains nothing. Milyukov and Kerensky, members of a bourgeois and
imperialist government, would readily subscribe to this general thesis, one
to the first part, and the other to the second.... [1]

| Written on March 26 (April 8), 1917 | Published according to the manuscript |
| --- | --- |
| First published in the magazine Bolshevik No. 3–4, 1924 | |

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Notes:
[1]
The manuscript breaks off here.— Ed .

[2]

The agrarian programme of the “104” —the land reform bill the
Trudovik members submitted to the 13th meeting of the First State Duma on
May 23 (June 5), 1900. Its purpose was to “establish a system under which
all the land, with its deposits and waters, would belong to the entire
people, and farmlands would be allowed only those tilling them by their own
labour” ( Documents and Materials of the State Duma , Moscow, 1957,
p. 172). The Trudoviks advocated organisation of a “national land fond”
that would include all state, crown, monastery and church lands, also part
of privately owned lands, which were to be alienated if the size of the
holding exceeded the labor norm fixed for the given area. Partial
compensation was to be paid for such alienated land. Small holdings were to
remain the property of the owner, but would eventually be brought into the
national fund. Implementation of the reform was to be supervised by local
committees elected by universal, direct and equal suffrage and by secret
ballot.