V. I. Lenin

Extraordinary All- Russia Railwaymen’s
Congress

January 5-30 (January 18-February 12), 1918 [1]

1

Report Of The Council Of People’s Commissars January 13 (26)

Comrades, I am unfortunately unable to report on all points and
hope that those of you who take a closer interest in the state
of affairs have got a full and accurate picture of the present
position of Soviet power, its attitude to other institutions and
the tasks now facing it, partly from newspaper reports and
partly from personal impressions at the Congress of
Soviets. Allow me, therefore, to confine myself to a few brief
additional remarks. In order to characterise the tasks and
position of Soviet power, I must tell you of its attitude to the
organisation of the railway proletariat, the railway workers.

Comrades, you are aware that Soviet power clashed with the
Constituent Assembly and that all the propertied classes—the landowners, the bourgeoisie, the Kaledinites
and their supporters—are now berating us for having dissolvedit. But the louder these complaints in the few
bourgeois papers, the louder is the voice of the workers, the
soldiers, the working and exploited people. The peasants say
that they have never doubted that Soviet power was head and
shoulders above any other power, and that the workers, soldiers
and peasants would never let any institution take over from
their own Soviets, which they had elected, and set up and which
they control and verify. You are well aware that Soviet power
clashed with the Constituent Assembly mainly because it had been
elected on lists drawn up before the October Revolution. The Constituent Assembly was elected on
the basis of proportional representation through universal,
direct and equal suffrage by secret ballot. That is the most
perfect electoral system but it can be a correct expression of
the people’s will only on one condition, namely, that the
parties which under that system alone have the right and
possibility of drawing up electoral lists are truly representative of the mood, the wishes, the interests and the
will of the groups of population electing them, because under
another electoral system, when individual candidates or deputies
are each elected by a separate district, the people, depending
on their mood or any political changes, can very easily correct
their mistakes. Under the system of proportional representation,
the lists had to be drawn up by each party as a whole long
before the elections actually took place; this explains how it
came about that the parties had to draw up their lists back in
September and early October for a Constituent Assembly that was
to have met on November 12. You all remember that there was a
statutory period within which all the parties had to submit
their lists, and that no changes were allowed after that. That
is how it came about that Russia’s biggest party—the one that was undoubtedly the biggest that summer and autumn, the
Socialist-Revolutionary Party—had to present its lists by
the beginning of October 1917 on behalf of the whole
Socialist-Revolutionary Party. That is what actually took
place. The lists of candidates were presented in early October,
including that of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, as if such
a party continued to exist as an entity. It turned out that the
conciliation with Kerensky came to an end after the list had
been drawn up, after the Russian workers and peasants had
travelled a long, hard and strenuous way in setting up their
Soviets. After all, Kerensky was also regarded as a
Socialist-Revolutionary—he was believed to be both a socialist and a revolutionary—although in actual fact he
was an imperialist who hid in his pocket secret treaties with
the French and British imperialists, the very same treaties that
had been concluded by the tsar, who was deposed in February, the
very same treaties which doomed the Russian people to participation in the bloodbath over whether or not the Russian
capitalists would seize Constantinople, the Dardanelles and
Armenia or a piece of Galicia; some who really let themselves
go, like the famous Milyukov, made maps, well in advance,
showing the strip of Eastern Prussia which was to be the Russian
people’s own reward for the blood shed by millions of its
workers and soldiers. There you have a true picture of the
dominant Russian bourgeois-imperialist republic of Kerensky, who
continued to be regarded as, and in fact was, a member of the
Socialist-Revolutionary Party.

The Second All-Russia Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and
Soldiers’ Deputies met in late October, by which time the
people were fed up with placating the imperialists, and the June
offensive had cost us hundreds of thousands of lives, and had
clearly shown why the war was dragging on, how these secret
treaties doomed the soldiers to the slaughter, and why talk of
peace remained nothing but talk. That was why the Second
All-Russia Congress of Soviets overthrew the rule of the
bourgeois-imperialist government and established Soviet
power. The elections to the Constituent Assembly fell on
November 12 and confronted the workers, soldiers and especially
the peasants with a situation in which they had to vote on the
old lists, because there were no others, and none could be drawn
up. So when we are now told, “You have dissolved the
Constituent Assembly which represents the majority of the
people”, when this is chorused by bourgeois pen-pushers and
newspapers of the Kerensky-socialist stamp, we respond:
“Why is it that you cannot make a single straightforward
statement to the people about the argument which I have just set
forth and which was contained in the decree dissolving the
Constituent Assembly?” We cannot consider the Constituent
Assembly to be expressive of the people’s will because it
was elected on old lists. The workers and especially the
peasants voted for the Socialist-Revolutionaries as a whole
party, but it split after the elections, and appeared before the
people as two parties: the Right-wingers, who sided with the
bourgeoisie, and the party of the Left
Socialist-Revolutionaries, who sided with the working class and
the working people, and came down on the side of socialism. Did
the people have any chance to choose between the Right and Left
Socialist-Revolutionaries under the Constituent Assembly? No,
they did not, and so we say that, even from this formal
standpoint of the lists and the election, no one can refute our
assertion that the Constituent Assembly was unable to give a
correct expression to the people’s will. The revolution is
not to blame for having come after the lists had been drawn up
and before the elections to the Constituent Assembly had been
held; the revolution is not to blame that the
Socialist-Revolutionary Party had kept the people, especially
the peasants, in the dark and misled them with talk for so long;
that only after October 25, when the Second Peasants’
Congress was convened, we saw that there could be no reconciliation between the Right and Left
Socialist-Revolutionaries, and it was then that there came a
series of congresses, starting with the soldiers’ and peasants’ and ending with the railwaymen’s congress.

Everywhere we found the same picture: everywhere there was, on
the one hand, the vast majority of those who truly belonged to
the working and exploited people, and came down fully, unconditionally and irrevocably on the side of Soviet power, and
on the other, the top layers of the bourgeoisie, the civil
servants, the executives, the rich peasants, all of whom sided
with the propertied classes and the bourgeoisie, and put out the
slogan: “All power to the Constituent Assembly”, the assembly that was elected before the revolution, when the people
had no way of distinguishing between Right and Left
Socialist-Revolutionaries. No, indeed, the revolution of the
working classes comes first and not the old lists; the interests
of the working and exploited people who were oppressed before
the revolution are paramount. If the Constituent Assembly goes
against the will of Soviet power, the will of a clear majority
of the working people, we say: Down with the Constituent
Assembly, and long live Soviet power. (Applause.)
Comrades, it is our daily experience that Soviet power is
meeting with ever greater support from the poor, the working and
exploited people in every branch of the economy and in every
part of the country, and no matter how we may be slandered by
bourgeois and by “socialist” newspapers, like those of
Kerensky’s party, the Right Socialist-Revolutionaries, no
matter how they may lie that our power is against the people and
does not have their support, they will still be patently lying. We got some very strong confirmation of this
just today. It was a report from the Don area (a night telegram)
about a congress held by a section of the Cossacks in Voronezh,
and a congress of 20 Cossack regiments and 5 batteries in
Kamenskaya village. The Cossacks at the front convened their own
congress because they saw that Kaledin was rallying officers,
cadets and landowners’ sons who do not want the Soviets to
take power in Russia and want the Don to have self-determination. A party is being formed there around
Kaledin, who styles himself the great chieftain, And so the
congress of the front-line Cossacks had to be dispersed.’8’ The Cossacks countered by, firstly,
uniting with the Voronezh Congress, and secondly, by declaring
war on Kaledin, thirdly, arresting the Cossack atamans, and
fourthly, occupying all the main stations.

Let the Ryabushinskys, who sent millions abroad and donated
millions over here to pay the saboteurs for obstructing Soviet
power, let the Ryabushinskys, and the capitalists of France and
Britain, together with the king of Rumania, let them all bewail
their fate; their last stake has been lost even in the Don area,
where there were the greatest number of rich peasants who lived
on hired labour, who exploited the labour of others, and carried
on a constant struggle against the migrant labourers driven to
those parts from afar by privation; even there, where exploiter-peasants were most numerous, the people resent this
organisation of cadets, officers and property-owners who have
decided to oppose Soviet power. Even there we find the same
division which everyone ignores and for which the blame is being
put on us. “The Bolsheviks have declared civil war.”
Is it possible that we have invented Kaledin; is it possible
that the Bolsheviks have invented Ryabushinsky? We all know that
they were the mainstay of the tsarist regime, and are now merely
lying in wait, biding their time to turn the Russian. Republic
into the kind of bourgeois republic that you have in most
countries where, with all the liberty and representation, the
working people are oppressed just as much as, if not more than,
in any monarchy. When we hear it said that the Bolsheviks are
kindling a fratricidal war, a civil war, when curses are heaped
on the Bolsheviks for having brought about the criminal
fratricidal civil war, we reply:

“What kind of fratricidal war is this? Are the
Ryabushinskys and Kaledins the working people’s brothers?
It is strange that the sailors, the soldiers, the workers and
the peasants had no inkling of this; it is strange that they had
never noticed this before; and it is strange that they firmly
demand that the Ryabushinskys and Kaledins submit to Soviet
power.”

The absurd, madcap attempt on the part of the cadets and
officers to stage an uprising in Petrograd and Moscow fizzled
out because the vast majority of the workers and soldiers are
clearly on the side of Soviet power. They were aware that if
they started a war, the soldiers would be armed and would not
give up their arms to anyone. The people rallied to take their
destiny into their own hands, and that was why they started the
revolution. They were very well aware that over here, in
Petrograd, the people were solidly behind Soviet power, and so
when they were routed both in Petrograd and Moscow they rushed
to the Don area to engineer a counter-revolutionary plot against
the working people over there, hoping to get support from the
bourgeois Rada in Kiev, which is on its last legs because it no
longer commands confidence. Having declared civil war on the
working people everywhere, they accused us of starting it. They
said: You are fostering civil war, down with civil war. We
replied: Down with the Ryabushinskys and Kaledins and all their
accomplices. (Applause.)

That is why, comrades, we say it is not true that we are
destroying democracy as the bourgeoisie’s grave charge and
assertion runs; nor is it true that we have destroyed faith in
the forms of democracy, in the cherished democratic institutions
which have for so long supported and fed the revolutionary
movement in Russia; it is not true that we have destroyed the
highest form of democracy, the Constituent Assembly. Under the
republic of the socialist Kerensky—a republic of the imperialist chieftains, the chieftains of the bourgeoisie with
secret treaties in thier pockets, driving the soldiers to war
(and calling it a just war)—the Constituent Assembly was
naturally preferable to the Pre-parliament, in which Kerensky,
by agreement with Chernov and Tsereteli, conducted the same
policy. We have been openly and straightforwardly saying from
the very start of the revolution—April 1917—that the
Soviets were a much higher, a very much more perfect and
purposeful form of democracy—a working people’s democracy—than the Constituent Assembly. The Constituent
Assembly unites all classes, which means also the exploiter
classes, the propertied classes, hence, the bourgeoisie and
those who received their education at the expense of the people,
at the expense of the exploited, and abandoned the people to
join the capitalists, turning their knowledge, the greatest
achievements of knowledge, into a tool for oppressing the
people, and fighting the working classes. For our part we
declare that when a revolution of the working and exploited
classes breaks out, all power in the state goes to their
organisation. This form of democracy is incomparably higher than
the old one. No party invented the Soviets. You know very well
that no party could have invented them. They were brought to
life by the 1905 revolution. And although at that time the
Soviets were short-lived, it was clear that they were the
people’s only reliable bulwark in the struggle against the
autocracy. Whenever the Soviets declined and gave way to some
national representative institutions—as all these Dumas,
congresses and assemblies have shown—the
Constitutional-Democrats, the capitalists and exploiters came to
the fore, deals were made with the tsar, the organs of the
people’s movement declined and the revolution collapsed. That is why when the 1917 Revolution did not merely
revive the Soviets but extended a network of them across the
country, they taught the workers, soldiers and peasants that
they could and should take all state power into their own hands,
not as in bourgeois parliaments, where every citizen has the
same rights as the next man. Life will not be sweeter for the
poor if the worker proclaims that he is the equal of
Ryabushinsky, and the peasant the equal of a man who owns 12,000
dessiatines of land. That is why the best form of democracy, the
best democratic republic is power without the landowners and the
rich.

The Russian people gained a great deal of experience much faster
and came to a decision in a matter of months because of the war,
the unprecedented dislocation, the famine, the danger of
extinction, the physical destruction of millions of people. From
April 20 on, when the wounded Linde marched his soldiers out
into a street in Petrograd to overthrow the government of
Milyukov and Guchkov, through the long period of ministerial
leapfrogging, when all the parties kowtowed the
Constitutional-Democrats and vied with each other in displaying
loud and alluring programmes, the people saw for themselves that
it was no use at all: they had been promised peace, but were in
fact driven into an offensive. In June 1917, tens of thousands
of soldiers died because of this secret treaty between the tsar
and the European imperialists, which Kerensky honoured. It was
not propaganda but this first-hand experience that helped the
people to make a comparison between the socialist power of the
Soviets and the bourgeois republic. They carried away the
conviction that there was nothing in the old reforms and the old
institutions of bourgeois imperialism for the working and
exploited people, and that only the power of the Soviets was
good enough for them. The people—and this includes workers,
soldiers, peasants and railwaymen, in fact, all working
people—are free to elect their own deputies to the Soviets
and are free to recall them when they do not satisfy the
people’s demands and wishes. You don’t sit in a Soviet to interpret laws or make brilliant parliamentary speeches but
to implement the freedoms and throw off the yoke of exploitation. The workers, on their own, will build their state
on new lines; they will build a new life in the new Russia
without any room for exploiters. That is what produced the
Soviets, and that is why we say that the experience of the
Russian revolution showed the people and went to confirm
something we had said long ago, namely, that Soviet power is a
much higher form of democracy than any bourgeois republic that
has taken shape in Western Europe; in a real democracy, the
working classes can and must control the non-working elements,
the exploiting section of society; workers, soldiers, peasants
and railwaymen can be their own masters; they can arrange an
exchange of goods between towns and villages, and set a fair
wage, without the capitalists and landowners.

That is why the Soviet Republic in Russia has now taken the
shape of a fully socialist republic which has taken away the
land from the landowners, established workers’ control in
industry, and put the banks in the hands of socialist workers’ organisations, giving the people access to the
immense wealth accumulated and stockpiled by the capitalists to
manage and use for the greater welfare and cultural growth of
all the working people and not for their oppression. That is the
task facing the Soviet Republic. And this is why we have so much
sympathy among the people, the working classes abroad, in spite
of the military censorship of the tsars, and the harassment of
socialist newspapers by the Kerenskys abroad. The bourgeois
newspapers over there tell lies about this country in a most
shameful fashion; our newspapers are suppressed: not a single
issue of Pravda has been allowed to go through. A few days ago a
friend of mine returned from Switzerland, from that part of the
country where I recently spent so many miserable days, and he
said that people in free Switzerland were not aware of the fact
that the free republics of free Europe were not letting through
any issues of our paper, that they read only the wholesale lies
circulated by the bourgeois newspapers, which do nothing but
rail at the Bolsheviks. Yet the workers in all countries have
understood that Soviet power in Russia is truly a working
people’s government. You will not find a single worker in
Europe today—either in Britain, France, Germany or any other country—who does not applaud news of the Russian
revolution, because they all regard it with hope and see it as a
torch that will light the flame all over Europe.

The Russian revolution was such a simple affair only’ because Russia had been under the most savage oppression of
tsarism and because no other country had been torn and tortured
by the war as she had been.

The Russian people were the first to raise the torch of the
socialist revolution, but they are aware that they are not alone
in their struggle and that they will accomplish their task with
the help of the most loyal comrades and friends. We don’t
know how long it will take for the socialist revolution to break
out in the other countries—it may take a long time. You
know how revolutions generally take place in other countries. Everyone here has been through 1917, and you all know
that three months before the revolution started, no one knew that it was coming. We know that
workers’ strikes have already spread to Austria. When the
European parties headed by their local Chernovs and Tseretelis
began to lose control of events and felt they had lost all
touch, there was talk of martial law there, and of military
dictatorship, in Germany; the strikes in Vienna have now been
stopped and the papers are out again. I have received a telegram
from our Stockholm representative, Vorovsky, and he says that
the movement has undoubtedly halted but that it is impossible to
crush it altogether, and that it would go on. There you have one
of the results of the fact that the peace negotiations have
opened at Brest and that we have kept our promise. The secret
treaties have been abrogated, published and exposed to public
shame. We have shown that we regard these commitments of the old
capitalists—whether they are known as secret treaties or
loans— as mere scraps of paper to be swept aside because
they hamper us, the working masses, in our construction of
socialist society. The working masses are beginning to realise
the impudence of the German demands at Brest, which revealed the
same plunderous and predacious urge behind a screen of promises
to accept a just peace. The delay is artificial, and the masses
are clear on this: they say that the war can be stopped, because
the Russian workers and peasants have stopped it, and that an
offensive can be started against the governments. On October 17,
1905, the first great nationwide strike was suppressed by the
autocracy, but it sparked off a chain of events and workers’ demonstrations in Austria, in Vienna and Prague,
and that was when the Austrians won their universal suffrage. Although the Russian revolution of 1905 was crushed by
tsarism, it gave hope to the West-European workers of great
reforms in the future, that is, the very events now taking
place.

When the Third Congress of Soviets opened, you all saw a number
of delegates from foreign parties who said in one voice that
from their observation of the working-class movement in Britain,
Switzerland and America they drew the conclusion that the
socialist revolution in Europe was becoming a task of the
day. The bourgeoisie over there is stronger and cleverer than
our Kerenskys; it has managed to get organised to make the
uprising of the masses more difficult.
Over there the workers have a measure of prosperity, which is
why it is more difficult to shake up the old socialist parties
which had been there for decades, had come to power, and had
acquired authority in the eyes of the people. But that kind of
authority is already running out, the masses are surging, and
there is no doubt at all that in the nearer possibly more
remote—future, the socialist revolution will be on the order of the day in all countries, because the oppression of
capital is at an end.

When we are told that the Bolsheviks have invented this utopian
idea of introducing socialism in Russia, which is an impossible
thing, we reply: How did it happen that utopians and dreamers
enjoy the sympathy of the majority of the workers, peasants and
soldiers? Did not the majority of the workers, peasants and
soldiers side with us because they had acquired a first-hand
knowledge of the war and its effects? They realised that there
was no way out of the old society, that the capitalists with all
their marvels of technology and culture were engaged in a
destructive war, and that men had degenerated to a state of
frenzy, savagery and starvation. That is what the capitalists
have done, and that is why we are faced with the alternative of
perishing or demolishing the old bourgeois society. That
explains why our revolution has depth. That is why we find that
in tiny neighbouring Estland, where the people are literate,
there was recently a congress of farm-hands who elected agents
to take control of all the efficient farms. This is a world-shaking development: farms are controlled by farm-hands
who had always been at the very bottom of the social scale in
the capitalist economy. Then take Finland, where the Diet spoke
on behalf of the nation, and the bourgeoisie demanded that we
should recognise her independence. We were not going to use
force to keep under Russia’s control or in one Russian state any of the nations tsarism had kept in by oppression. We
had not planned to attract other nations—the Ukraine or
Finland—by force or imposition but by allowing them to set
up their own socialist system, their own Soviet republics. We
now find that a working-class revolution is expected to break
out in Finland almost any day. This is the same Finland that had
enjoyed complete internal freedom for 12 years—since
1905—and had the right to elect democratic institutions. Between 1905 and 1917, the sparks of the fire
which the Bolsheviks are alleged to have fanned artificially,
also penetrated into that country which is distinguished for its
high culture, its efficient economy and its history, and we find
the socialist revolution beginning there as well. This proves
that we are not blinded by party struggles, that we had not
acted according to plan, and that it was nothing but mankind’s hopeless state since the war began that brought
on the revolution, and made the socialist revolution invincible.

Comrades, let me point out in conclusion that the same thing has
happened at this railwaynien’s congress. We saw your hard
fight against your top-drawer railway organisations. You
railwaymen have seen for yourselves that the mass of working
railway proletarians bore the brunt of the effort to get the
railways running. Things did not come to such a pass by pure
chance: either they had been deliberately hampered by the
bourgeoisie, bribed by the millionaires who threw in hundreds of
thousands of rubles and were prepared to go to any length to
destroy Soviet power, or had been caused by the bourgeoisie’s refusal to change the system, because it held
that that was how God had ordained all things—there have
always been masters and servants, and the rich have always
abused the poor who worked for them. In effect the railway
officials thought that such a state of affairs had been ordained
by God, which meant there could be no other system, and that
chaos would result from any attempt to change it. But that did
not happen. The unity of the working masses is paramount; they
will establish their own discipline of equals and, using the
technical and cultural achievements, make the railways run like
clockwork, and carry on the exchange of goods between town and
country to help the workers and peasants organise the economy on
a Russia-wide scale and enable the working masses to make use of
the products of their labour without the capitalists and
landowners. When this is done scientific and technical knowledge
will no longer help a handful of men to get rich and stuff their
money-bags, but will help to improve the operation of the
railway system as a whole. This is of especial importance to
us. You know how much corruption, swindling and speculation
there is at each junction; you also know that the exploiters are
spending millions to disrupt transportation and get cars into
places where they cannot be found. All this is being done to
aggravate the famine and incite the people against Soviet
power. But you all know that if the majority of railway
organisations unite and set themselves the task of supporting
Soviet power, all the swindlers, saboteurs, capitalists and
exploiters—all these remnants of bourgeois society will be
ruthlessly swept away. Only then will it be possible to organise
the railways in a proper manner and achieve the complete
liberation of the workers, soldiers and peasants from the power
of the oppressors. Only then we shall have socialism. (The entire audience joins in stormy applause.)

2

Replies To Notes

Comrades, the notes lying before me fall into two groups: one
raises the question of the Constituent Assembly, the other, of
the famine and the economic chaos. I shall reply on these two
points, putting those notes together that more or less refer to
the same topic. About the Constituent Assembly we are being
asked: Was it fair to dissolve it, and shouldn’t another
one be convened? Or wouldn’t it have been more correct to
refer the question to a popular referendum before dissolving the
Constituent Assembly? No, comrades, neither a referendum nor a
new constituent assembly can help matters. That is how the
parties in Russia have taken shape. We have seen where the
sympathies of the capitalists, and where those of the workers
and peasants lie. Soviet power was not established by decree or
party resolution, because it is above parties, and is the
outcome of revolutionary experience, the experience of millions
of men: it was no accident at all that the Soviets first emerged
in 1905, and in 1917 grew to full stature and established a new
republic, the likes of which do not exist in any European
country, and will not exist in any of them so long as they are
ruled by capital. But the Soviet Republic will triumph everywhere, and that is when the decisive blow will be dealt at
capital. I must point out that the Constituent Assembly and the
referendum are based on the old bourgeois parliamentary pattern
and because capital holds sway, any popular poll has to reckon
and bargain with it. Soviet power does not produce men who fence
in parliament and exchange brilliant speeches, the while
consolidating the rule of capital and the bureaucracy. Soviet
power springs from the working masses themselves;.it does not
produce a parliament, but an assembly of working people’s
representatives who enact laws which are implemented immediately, are translated into life and are aimed at fighting
the exploiters. The old-type constituent assembly and referendum
were designed to unite the will of the whole nation and create
the possibility of the sheep living side by side with the
wolves, the exploited with the exploiters. That is something we
don’t want. It is something we have tried out and gone through. We’ve had enough. And we are sure that the
majority of the workers, peasants and soldiers feel that way
too. At a time when the war has forced us to make a series of
heroic efforts to escape the grip of capital or perish in the
attempt, we are invited to put on an experiment which had
already been tried out in some European countries, and which
would give us the old bourgeois capitalism and national
representation, instead of the representation of the working
masses. We do not want bourgeois representation but the
representation of the exploited and the oppressed that would
wage a ruthless fight against the exploiters. That is the
intention of Soviet power, which does not include either
parliament or referendum. It is superior to both, because if the
working people are dissatisfied with their party they can elect
other delegates, hand power to another party and change the
government without any revolution at all, for their experience
of Kerensky-Kaledin and the bourgeois Rada has shown that it is
impossible to fight against Soviet power. There might be a
handful of men in Russia today fighting against Soviet power,
but such eccentrics are few, and they will disappear in a matter
of weeks, while Soviet power will triumph as an organisation of
the oppressed class for the overthrow of the oppressors and
removal of the exploiters.

I now come to the famine, this horrible curse of our time which
threatens us. What is the main cause of the chaos? The main
cause of the chaos which threatens the towns and industrial
areas with famine js the sway of saboteurs, and the economic
chaos these saboteurs keep stirring up, while blaming it on
us. We are very well aware that there is enough grain in Russia
and that it is stored in Kaledin’s realm, in far-away
Siberia and in the grain producing gubernias. I must say that
the exploited classes will never succeed in liberating themselves unless they set up a firm, ruthless and revolutionary
government. About the saboteurs, let me say, comrades, that we
know the addresses at which sabotaging civil servants called to
collect and sign for a three-month advance on their salaries, to
which Ryabushinsky had contributed 5 million, the Anglo-French
imperialists so much, and the Rumanian, so much. Here is what
sabotage means: it means people, senior officials, who are
bribed and whose only purpose is to overthrow Soviet power,
although many of them are not aware of this. Sabotage is the
effort to restore the old paradise for the exploiters and the
old hell for the working people. But if we are to frustrate them
in this purpose, we must break down their resistance.

Railwaymen’s pay is another point that has been brought to
our notice. This is nothing but a misunderstanding. It may have
been that one commissar took this view of the affair and issued
a decree but amended it’70 as soon as he received instructions from the Council of People’s Commissars, so
that anyone who says that that had been the Soviet
Government’g intention doesn’t know what he is talking about.

What are we to do to eliminate the famine and the chaos?
Firstly, the capitalists’ resistance must be broken, and
the saboteurs driven to the wall. When the supporters of
Novaya Zhizn and other ostensibly socialist periodicals
say that sabotage has not been stopped in these ten weeks, I
say: why don’t you help us stop it? The banks have now passed under the authority of the Soviets. Here is what happened
yesterday: a certain specialist writer by the name of Finn
Yenotayevsky came to see me on behalf of 50,000 persons and
declared that the banks were prepared to operate entirely under
the authority of Soviet power. (Loud applause.)
“High time, too,” I said to this spokesman of the bank officials. We will not refuse to negotiate with any
organisation, be it an organisation of bank officials or any
other, provided such recognition of Soviet power is actually
accepted by the majority of the working people. That is what we
were told by the bank officials who are in the habit of putting
through unheard-of speculative deals to turn an honest penny,
all of which keeps their pockets bulging with profits running
into millions of rubles.

Now they want to negotiate with us, but these negotiations will
differ from those of Kerensky. We shall not discuss any reform
of banking. After occupying the banks with armed force, we enter
into negotiations and issue orders and instructions. It is
important for us to break down the resistance of the saboteurs
before opening negotiations. That is the way to fight the famine
and the chaos, and this alone can help us to overcome the
horrors of capitalism and anarchy. You know of the terrible
chaos that has spread everywhere in the world, especially in
Russia, where tsarism has left a legacy of graft, violence,
hatred and humiliation of the working people. This is followed
by complaints about chaos; I put it to you: can the war-weary
men who have stood in the trenches for three years fight to
increase the profits of the Russian capitalists and capture
Constantinople for them? On every hand they see that millions
are being spent to overthrow Soviet power and get the country
under control.

Comrades, such changes cannot be expected to take place
overnight. The socialist revolution is on, and everything now
depends on the establishment of a discipline of equals, the
discipline of the working masses themselves, which must take the
place of capitalist barrack-room discipline. When the railway
workers take power into their own hands, they will wipe out
sabotage and speculation through their armed organisation, and
set themselves the task of prosecuting those who engage in graft
and disrupt railway traffic. Such people should be prosecuted as
arch-criminals, fighting against the people’s power. It is
on such a well-knit, vigorous organisation—a Soviet organisation—that the fight against the capitalists, the
saboteurs, the swindlers and the Ryabushinskys depends. That is
the way to defeat the famine, because Russia has everything she
needs: iron, oil and grain, in short, everything it takes to
have a decent life. If we defeat the exploiters, we shall
establish Soviet power and economic control in Russia, and that
is the way it is going to be. (Stormy applause.)

---
Notes:
[1]
Extraordinary AIl-Russia Railwaymen’s Congress was held in Petrograd from January 5 to 30 (January 18 to February
12), 1918. The Left wing of the Second Extraordinary
Railwaymen’s Congress called by the Vikzhel on December 19,
1917 (January 1, 1918), walked out a held a separate congress when
the Right wing (Right Socialist-Revolutionaries Mensheviks, etc.)
adopted a resolution by a majority of 12 to the effect that all
power in the country must belong to the Constituent Assembly.

The resolution adopted by the Extraordinary All-Russia
Railwaymen’ s Congress said that it was solidly behind
Soviet power. It worked out new wage rates for railway workers
and officials; adopted railway regulations and rules for the
peoples railway militia, heard a report oil the nationalisation
of private railways, etc.. It elected a new All-Russia
Railway’s Executive Committee (Vikzhedor).