Vladimir Lenin

Letter To The Presidium Of The Conference Of Proletarian Cultural
And Educational
Organisations [1]

17.9.18

Dear Comrades, Many thanks for your good wishes, and the very best of luck in your work.

One of the chief conditions for the socialist revolution's
victory is that the working class must realise it has to rule
and that its rule should be carried through during the transition period from capitalism to socialism. The
rule of the proletariat, the vanguard of all the working and exploited people, is essential in this transition
period if classes are to be completely abolished, if the
resistance of the exploiters is to be suppressed, and if the
entire mass of the working and exploited people—crushed,
downtrodden and disunited by capitalis—are to be united around the urban workers and brought in close
alliance with them.

All our successes have been due to the workers grasping this and governing the state through their Soviets.

But the workers have not yet grasped this sufficiently and are often too timid in promoting workers to governing the state.

Fight for this, comrades! Let the proletarian cultural and
educational organisations help in this. That will be a pledge of
further success and the final victory of the socialist revolution.

Greetings,

V. Ulyanov (Lenin)

Endnotes

[1]
Lenin wrote this letter in reply to the message of greetings sent
by the Conference.

The First All-Russia Conference of Proletarian Cultural and
Educational Organisations was held in Moscow from September
15-20, 1918. According to the figures supplied by the mandate
commission, 330 delegates attended. Lenin's letter was read at
the fifth session, on September 19. The speakers at the
Conference included N. K. Krupskaya, M. N. Pokrovsky and
Proletkult leaders A. A. Bogdanov, P. I. Lebedev-Polyansky,
F. I. Kalinin and others.

The Conference resolutions reflected the erroneous stand of the
Proletkult leaders who attempted to shirk the tasks of mass
cultural and educational work, to build up a "proletarian
culture" in isolation from past culture, a culture divorced from
life and the people.

recalling the conditions that gave rise to the letter, Krupskaya
wrote: “The Proletkult was a great influence in those days. A shortcoming of the Proletkult, in Ilyich's opinion, was
that its work was insufficiently linked with the general
political tasks of the struggle, that it did not do enough
towards stimulating the people, promoting workers and preparing
them for state administration through the medium of the
Soviets. In his message of greetings to the Conference he made
it a point of mentioning the political tasks that confronted the
Proletkult.” (N. K. Krupskaya, Reminiscences of Lenin, Moscow, 1959, p. 483.)