V. I. Lenin

Speech Delivered At A Meeting In The Alexeyevsky Riding School [1]

July 2, 1918

Brief Newspaper Report

Lenin pointed out that the army, like the means of production, had formerly been an
instrument of oppression in the hands of the exploiting class. Today in Russia both were
becoming weapons in the struggle for the interests of the working people.

This radical change was no easy thing to accomplish, as the soldiers of the old tsarist
army knew from the discipline that held that army in a vice. Lenin then cited a recent
experience of his. When he was in Finland, he had heard an old Finnish peasant woman say that
whereas in the old days the man with the gun was there to prevent her gathering faggots in
the forest, today he was no longer dangerous; on the contrary, he even protected her. In
spite of all the mud slung at us by the bourgeois and their followers, Lenin said, in spite
of all the plotting of the whiteguards, once it had been brought home even to such
unenlightened masses, the exploited, that the present army was their protector, the Soviet
government stood firmly planted.

Lenin then went on to say that, as in the past, famine was strengthening the hand of the
profiteers and capitalists. The same thing was occurring today, so that the new army might in
the civil war have to deal with these people who were making money out of the famine. Let the
old worldthe representatives of an outworn society-go on trying to help the starving in the
old way; the new world would, despite them, do it in a new way. We would win, Lenin said, if
the vanguard of the working people, the Red Army, remembered that it was there to represent
and defend the interests of international socialism. Lenin further said that we were not
alone, as had been shown by the events in Austria, as well as by like-minded people in all
the countries of Europe, who, although held in subjection at present, were doing their
work.

Endnotes

[1] On July 2, 1918; meetings of
men called up for the Red Army were held in Moscow. The public meeting in the former
Alexeyevsky Riding School was attended by about 1,500 mobilised men and Red Army volunteers.
After Lenin and other speakers had addressed the meeting there was a concert. The atmosphere
at the meeting was one of great enthusiasm.

The same day Lenin went to a meeting at the Salamonsky Circus but did not
speak because the meeting did not start on time..