Date: 1918
Source: ru:PSS/v36; ru:LS/v18

(The appearance of Comrade Lenin is met with stormy, prolonged applause.) Comrades! You all, of course, know how the greatest calamity has now befallen our country – famine. And before we proceed to the question of measures to combat this calamity, which has now become most acute, we must first raise the question of what are the fundamental causes of this calamity. If we raise this question, then we must tell ourselves and remember that this calamity has befallen not only Russia, but also all, even the most cultured, advanced, civilized countries.

In Russia, over the past few decades, especially now, in the revolution, it has happened more than once that famine has struck entire regions of our agricultural country, where the vast majority of the Russian peasantry was ruined and crushed by the oppression of the tsars, landowners, and capitalists. But the same calamity reigns in Western European countries. Many of these countries have forgotten for not only decades, but even centuries, what famine is, so highly developed was agriculture in them, so well supplied with a huge amount of imported grain were those European countries that did not have enough of their own grain. And now, in the twentieth century, along with even greater progress in technology, along with the wonders of inventions, along with the enormous use of machines and electricity, new internal combustion engines in agriculture, – along with all this, we, in all European countries without exception, now see the same calamity – famine – looming over the peoples. As if with civilization, with the culture of the country, they are again returning to primitive barbarism, again experiencing a situation when morals become savage, people become bestial in the struggle for a piece of bread. What caused this turn to barbarism in a number of European countries, in most of them? We all know that it was caused by the imperialist war, a war that has been tormenting humanity for four years now, a war that has already cost the peoples more, significantly more than ten million young lives, a war that was caused by self-serving capitalists, a war that is being waged over who, which greatest predator, English or German, will dominate the world, acquire colonies, and strangle small nations.

This war, which has engulfed almost the entire globe, which has claimed no less than ten million lives, not counting the millions mutilated, crippled, and sick, a war that has torn away from productive labor, in addition, millions of the healthiest and best forces, – this war has led to the fact that humanity now stands in a state of complete barbarism. What was foreseen as the worst, most agonizing, most difficult end of capitalism by numerous writers of socialist orientation, who said: capitalist society, based on the seizure of private property, land, factories, plants, and tools, by a handful of capitalists, monopolists, will turn into a socialist society, the only one capable of putting an end to the war, for the "civilized," "cultured" capitalist world is heading for an unprecedented collapse, which is capable of tearing and will inevitably tear all the foundations of cultural life. Not only in Russia, I repeat, but also in the most cultured advanced countries, like Germany, in which labor productivity is incomparably higher, which can supply the world with technical means with a huge surplus and, still freely communicating with distant countries, can supply the population with food products, we see famine, incomparably better organized, stretched out for a longer time than in Russia, but famine even more severe, even more agonizing. Capitalism has led to such a severe and agonizing collapse that it is now perfectly clear to everyone that the present war cannot end without a series of the most severe and bloodiest revolutions, of which the Russian revolution was only the first, was only the beginning.

You are now hearing news of how, for example, in Vienna, the Soviet of Workers' Deputies is being founded for the second time, the working population is being engulfed for the second time by an almost universal mass strike{164}. We hear how in cities that until now were models of capitalist order, culture, and civilization, like Berlin, it is becoming dangerous to go out on the street in the dark, because, despite the most ferocious measures of persecution and the strictest security, war and famine have brought people there to a state of complete savagery, have brought them to such anarchy, to such indignation, that not only the sale, but direct robbery, direct war for a piece of bread is becoming the order of the day in all cultural, civilized states.

Comrades, if therefore we observe in our homeland now what a painful, difficult situation has arisen in connection with the famine, then we must explain to those few, but still completely blind, ignorant people the basic and main causes of the famine. You can still meet people among us who reason: under the Tsar there was still bread, but the revolution came, and there is no bread. And it is understandable that, perhaps, indeed, for some village old women, the entire development of history over the past ten years boils down to this, that before there was bread, but now there is none. This is understandable, because famine is such a calamity that sweeps away all other questions, pushes them aside and only puts it at the forefront and subordinates everything else to it. But it is understandable that our task, the task of conscious workers, is to explain to the broadest masses, to explain to absolutely all representatives of the working masses of both the city and the countryside, what is the main cause of the famine, because, without explaining this, we cannot create either in ourselves or in the representatives of the working masses a correct attitude, we cannot create a correct understanding of its harm, we cannot create the firm determination and mood necessary to combat this calamity. And if we remember that this calamity was created by the imperialist war, that now even the richest countries are experiencing unprecedented famine and the vast majority of the working masses are suffering incredibly, if we remember that this imperialist war has been forcing workers of different countries to shed blood for the benefit, for the self-interest of the capitalists for four years now, if we remember that the longer this war drags on, the less of an exit there is from it, then we will understand what gigantic, immeasurable forces must be given to the movement.

The war has been dragging on for almost four years now. Russia has withdrawn from the war, and thanks to the fact that it withdrew alone, it found itself between two packs of imperialist predators, each of which is tearing, strangling, and taking advantage of Russia's temporary defenselessness and disarmed state. The war has been dragging on for four years now. The German imperialist predators have won a series of victories and continue to deceive their workers, some of whom have been bribed by the bourgeoisie, have gone over to their side, repeat the vile bloody lie about defending the fatherland, since in fact the German soldiers are defending the selfish predatory interests of the German capitalists, who promise them that Germany will bring peace, will give prosperity, but we see in fact that the victories of Germany, the wider they become, the more they reveal its hopeless situation.

Germany boasted during the Brest-Litovsk peace, when it concluded a violent exploitative, based on violence, on the oppression of peoples, Brest-Litovsk peace, the German capitalists boasted that they would give bread and peace to the workers. And now they are lowering the bread ration in Germany. The food campaign in rich Ukraine turned out, by general admission, to be a collapse, and in Austria it again came to hunger riots, to a nationwide mass uprising, because the further Germany wins its victories, the clearer it becomes to everyone, even to many representatives of the big bourgeoisie of Germany, that the war is hopeless, that even if the Germans can resist on the Western Front, this will not bring them any closer to the end of the war, but will create another enslaved country that needs to be occupied, occupied by German detachments and continue the war, and the disintegration of the German army, which is turning and will turn from an army into a gang of robbers, people who commit violence against foreign peoples, against unarmed peoples, pumping out the last remnants of food and raw materials from there with the enormous resistance of the population. The further Germany approaches the outskirts of Europe, the clearer it becomes that England and America are standing before it, that they are much more developed, with greater productive forces, which find time to send tens of thousands of the best new forces to Europe in order to turn all machines, all factories and plants into a means of destruction. The war is coming again, and this means that every year, moreover, every month brings an expansion of this war. There is no other way out of this war than revolution, than civil war, than the transformation of the war between capitalists over their profits, over the division of spoils, over the strangulation of small countries into a war of the oppressed against the oppressors, the only war that always accompanies in history not only great, but also any significant revolutions, the only war that is the only legitimate and just, sacred war from the point of view of the interests of the working people, the oppressed, the exploited masses. (Applause.) Without such a war, there is no way out of imperialist slavery. We must give a clear account of what new calamities civil war brings to every country. These calamities will be all the more severe the more cultured the country. Imagine a country with machines, railways in a civil war, which interrupts communication between regions of the country. Imagine what the situation will be for regions that have adapted for decades to living by exchanging industries, and you will understand that every civil war brings even new severe calamities, which the greatest socialists also imagined. The imperialists are dooming the working class to calamities, torments, and extinction. Before the new socialist society, no matter how difficult, agonizing these torments of all humanity are, it becomes clearer every day that the war that the imperialists started will not be ended by these imperialists, but will be ended by other classes, the working class, which in all countries is coming into greater and greater movement, indignation, and outrage every day, which, regardless of feelings and mood, is forced by the force of things to overthrow the rule of the capitalists. We in Russia, when the calamities of famine are especially felt, have to go through such a period, the most difficult period that any revolution has ever faced, and we cannot count on the immediate help of Western European comrades. The whole burden of the Russian revolution lies in the fact that it was much easier for the Russian revolutionary working class to start than for other Western European classes, but it is more difficult for us to continue. There, in Western European countries, it is more difficult to start a revolution, because the highest thought of culture stands against the revolutionary proletariat, and the working class is in cultural slavery.

At this time, we, already by virtue of our international situation, have to go through an incredibly difficult time, and we, the representatives of the working masses, the workers, the conscious workers, must explain in all our agitation and propaganda, in every speech, in every appeal, conversation in the factory, in every meeting with the peasants, that the calamity that has befallen us is an international calamity, that there is no way out of it except through international revolution. If we have had to go through such an agonizing period, when we have temporarily remained alone, then all our forces must be directed to enduring this difficult period steadfastly, knowing that we are not alone in the end, that the calamities that we are experiencing are creeping up on every European country, and that none of these countries will find a way out without a series of revolutions.

In Russia, famine has loomed over us, aggravated by the fact that the forced peace has taken away from Russia the most grain-producing, most fertile provinces; it has been further aggravated by the fact that we are approaching the end of the old food campaign. There are still several weeks left until the new harvest, which is distinguished by undoubted abundance, which therefore represent the most difficult transition, and this transition, being difficult in general, has been aggravated by the fact that in Russia the overthrown exploitative classes of landowners and capitalists are making every effort, straining every nerve to try again and again to regain power. This is one of the main reasons why it is precisely the Siberian grain-producing provinces that are now cut off from us thanks to the uprising of the Czechoslovaks. But we know well what forces are driving this uprising, we know well how the Czechoslovak soldiers declare to the representatives of our troops and our workers and our peasants that they do not want to fight with Russia and the Russian Soviet government, that they only want to break through with weapons in their hands to the outskirts, and at their head are the same yesterday's generals, landowners, capitalists, working for Anglo-French money, enjoying the support of Russian social-traitors who have gone over to the side of the bourgeoisie. (Applause.)

This whole warm company is taking advantage of the famine to make another attempt to return the landowners and capitalists to power. Comrades, the experience of our revolution confirms those words that always distinguish the representatives of scientific socialism, Marx and his followers, from the utopian socialists, from the petty-bourgeois socialists, from the intellectual socialists, from the dreamers-socialists. The intellectual dreamers, the petty-bourgeois socialists – they thought, perhaps, think, dream that socialism will succeed in being introduced through persuasion. The majority of the people will be convinced, and when they are convinced, the minority will obey, the majority will vote, and socialism will be introduced. (Applause.) No, the earth is not so happily arranged; the exploiters, the beast-landowners, the capitalist class are not amenable to persuasion. The socialist revolution confirms what everyone has seen – the greatest resistance of the exploiters. The stronger the pressure of the oppressed classes, the closer they come to overthrowing all oppression, all exploitation, the more decisively the oppressed peasants and the oppressed workers unfold the initiative, the independent initiative, the more frenzied the resistance of the exploiters becomes.

And we are experiencing the most difficult, most agonizing period of transition from capitalism to socialism – a period that inevitably, in all countries, will be a long, very long period, because, I repeat, to every success of the oppressed class, the oppressors respond with new and new attempts to resist, to overthrow the power of the oppressed class. The Czechoslovak revolt, clearly supported by Anglo-French imperialism, which is pursuing a policy of overthrowing Soviet power, indicates what this resistance is worth. We see how this revolt is intensifying, naturally, by famine. It is understandable that the broad masses of the working people contain very many people who – you know this especially well: each of you observes this in the factory – are not enlightened socialists and cannot be them, because they need to work hard in the factory and they have neither the time nor the opportunity to become socialists. It is understandable that these people sympathize when they see how the workers in the factory are rising, who are getting the opportunity to start learning the business of managing enterprises themselves, a difficult, hard business, in which mistakes are inevitable, but the only business in which the workers can finally realize their constant desire for machines, factories, plants, the best modern technology, the best achievements of humanity to serve not exploitation, but to improve life, to ease the life of the vast majority. But when they see how the imperialist predators from the west, from the north and east are taking advantage of Russia's defenselessness to tear the soul out of it, and, until they know how things will stand with the workers' movement in other countries, it is understandable that they are guided by despair. It cannot be otherwise. It is ridiculous to expect and it would be absurd to think that from a capitalist society based on exploitation, a complete awareness of the necessity of socialism and its understanding could immediately appear. This cannot be. It is developed only in the end and only by the struggle that has to be experienced in such an agonizing period, when one revolution has turned out to be ahead of others, and others do not help, and when famine is looming. Naturally, despair, indignation inevitably seizes the layers of the working people, there is a mood to wave their hand at whatever it may be. And it is understandable that the counter-revolutionaries, the landowners and capitalists and their coverers and accomplices are taking advantage of this moment to make a new and new onslaught on the socialist power.

We see what this led to in all the cities where there was no help from foreign bayonets. We know that Soviet power could only be defeated when people who shouted so much about defending the fatherland and about their patriotism showed their capitalist nature and began to make deals today with German bayonets to cut Ukrainian Bolsheviks together with them, tomorrow with Turkish bayonets to attack the Bolsheviks, the day after tomorrow – with Czechoslovak bayonets to overthrow Soviet power and cut Bolsheviks in Samara. Only foreign aid, only the help of foreign bayonets, only the sale of Russia to Japanese, German, Turkish bayonets, only it has so far given at least a shadow of success to the compromisers of capitalism and the landowners. But we know that when an uprising of this kind, on the basis of famine and the despair of the masses, rose up, when it engulfed an area where foreign bayonets could not be called for help, as it was in Saratov, in Kozlov, Tambov, the power of the landowners, capitalists and their friends, hiding behind the beautiful slogans of the Constituent Assembly, this power measured the duration of its existence in days, if not hours. The further the detachments of Soviet troops were from the center that the counter-revolution had temporarily seized, the more decisive the movement among the urban workers was, the more independence these workers and peasants showed in going to the aid of Saratov, Penza, Kozlov and immediately overthrowing the established power of the counter-revolution.

Comrades, if you look at these events from the point of view of everything that is happening in world history, if you remember that your task – our common task – is to explain to ourselves and try to explain to the masses that these greatest calamities have befallen us not by chance, but by virtue of the imperialist war, firstly, and by virtue of the frenzied resistance of the landowners, capitalists and exploiters, if we understand this, then we can guarantee that this true consciousness, no matter how difficult it may be, will seep more and more into the broad masses, and we will succeed in organizing discipline, overcoming indiscipline in our factories and helping the people to survive this agonizing period, especially difficult, which is measured, perhaps, by one, two months, a number of weeks remaining until the new harvest.

You know that in Russia now, in connection with the Czechoslovak counter-revolutionary revolt that has cut off Siberia from us, in connection with the constant rebellion in the south, in connection with the war, the situation is especially difficult, but it is understandable that the more difficult the situation of the country that is facing famine, the more decisive, the more firm our measures to combat this famine must be. The main measure of the struggle is the establishment of a grain monopoly. On this score, you all know perfectly well and observe around you from experience how the kulaks, the rich, shout against the grain monopoly at every step. This is understandable, because where the grain monopoly was temporarily overthrown, as Skoropadsky did in Kiev, it turned out that speculation reaches unprecedented proportions, there the price of a pood of bread rises to 200 rubles. It is understandable that when there is no product without which one cannot live, every owner of the product can become rich, prices reach unprecedented proportions. It is understandable that the horror, the panic before starvation death make the prices soar to unprecedented proportions, and in Kiev they had to think about returning the monopoly back. We have long ago, even before the Bolsheviks, the government, despite all the wealth of Russia in bread, had to be convinced of the necessity of a grain monopoly. Only people who are completely ignorant or directly sold to the interests of the moneybag can speak against it. (Applause.)

But, comrades, when we talk about the grain monopoly, we must think about what enormous difficulties of implementation are contained in this word. It is easy to say: grain monopoly, but you need to think about what it means. It means that all the surplus grain belongs to the state; it means that not a single pood of grain that the peasant household does not need, that is not needed to support his family and livestock, that is not needed for sowing, – that every extra pood of grain must be taken into the hands of the state. How to do it? It is necessary that prices be set by the state, it is necessary that every extra pood of grain be found and brought. Where to get the peasant, whose consciousness has been dulled for hundreds of years, who has been robbed, hammered to dullness by the landowners and capitalists, never allowing him to eat his fill, – where to get him in a few weeks or in a few months the consciousness of what a grain monopoly is; where can tens of millions of people, whom the state has fed so far only with oppression, only with violence, only with bureaucratic robbery and plunder, these peasants, abandoned in the depths of the countryside and condemned there to ruin, where can they get the concept of what a worker-peasant power is, that power is in the hands of the poor; that the bread that is surplus and has not passed into the hands of the state, if it remains in the hands of the owner, then the one who withholds it is a robber, an exploiter, the culprit of the agonizing starvation of the workers of Petrograd, Moscow, etc.? Where can he know, when he has been kept in ignorance until now, when in the village his business was only to sell bread; where to get this consciousness? It is not surprising that if we put the question closer to life, look into it, then the whole incredible difficulty of such a task as the task of carrying out a grain monopoly in a country in which the majority of peasants were kept in darkness by tsarism and the landowners, – in a country of peasantry, which for the first year after many centuries sowed bread on its own land, stands before us. (Applause.)

But the greater this difficulty, the more it becomes before an attentive and thoughtful attitude to the matter, the more clearly we must tell ourselves what we have always said, that the liberation of the workers must be the work of the workers themselves. We have always said: the liberation of the working people from oppression cannot be brought from the outside; they themselves, by their struggle, by their movement, by their agitation, must learn to solve the new historical task, and the more difficult, the more great, the more responsible the new historical task, the more people, millions of whom must be involved in independent participation in solving these tasks. To sell bread to any merchant, any trader, no consciousness, no organization is needed for this. For this, you need to live as the bourgeoisie ordered to live: you only need to be an obedient slave, to imagine and recognize the world as magnificent in the form in which the bourgeoisie arranged it. But in order to defeat this capitalist chaos, in order to implement the grain monopoly, in order to ensure that every surplus, every extra pood of bread belongs to the state, a long, difficult, hard organizational work is needed, not of organizers, not of agitators, but of the masses themselves.

There are such people in the Russian countryside; the majority of peasants belong to the poorest and poor peasants, who cannot trade surpluses of bread, surpluses of bread and turn into robbers, who keep, perhaps, hundreds of poods of bread, when another is starving. Now the situation is such that every peasant who calls himself, perhaps, a laboring peasant – some people love this word very much, – but if you call a laboring peasant the one who has collected hundreds of poods of bread by his labor and even without any hired labor, and now sees that, perhaps, if he keeps these hundreds of poods, then he can sell them not for 6 rubles, but will sell them to speculators or will sell them to the exhausted, tormented by hunger urban worker who came with a hungry family, who will give 200 rubles for a pood, – such a peasant who hides hundreds of poods, who holds them to raise the price and get even 100 rubles for a pood, turns into an exploiter – worse than a robber. What to do in such a situation, who can we rely on in our struggle? We know that the Soviet revolution and the Soviet power differs from other revolutions and other powers in that it not only overthrew the power of the landowners and capitalists, that it not only destroyed the serf, autocratic state, – moreover, the masses revolted against all officials, they created a new state in which power must belong to the workers and peasants and not only must, but already belongs. In this state there are no police and officials, there is no permanent army that would be taken into barracks for many years, would be separated from the people and would be trained to shoot at the people.

We are arming the workers and peasants, who must learn military affairs. There are detachments that succumb to temptation and vices, and crimes, because they are not cut off by the Chinese wall from the world of oppression, from the world of hunger, in which whoever is full wants to profit from his satiety. And we observe therefore, constantly, those phenomena that detachments of conscious workers who come from Petrograd and Moscow often go astray on the spot, turn into criminals. And we observe how the bourgeoisie claps its hands and fills the columns of its venal press with all sorts of intimidation of the people: look, what are your detachments, what a mess it is, how much better were the detachments of private capitalists!

Thank you kindly, gentlemen bourgeois! No, you will not intimidate us! You know very well that healing from the calamities and sores of the capitalist world will not come immediately. And we know that healing will come only in the struggle, that we will exhibit each such case not for malice and not for supporting the counter-revolutionary tricks of the Mensheviks and Cadets, but to teach broader popular masses. If our detachments do not fulfill their purpose, give more conscious, broader detachments in terms of the number of workers devoted to their class, many times exceeding the number of those who succumbed to temptation. They need to be organized, they need to be enlightened, they need to be united around each conscious worker with unconscious working people, exploited and hungry. It is necessary to raise the rural poor, it is necessary to enlighten them, it is necessary to show them that the Soviet power will give and do everything possible to help them, only to implement the grain monopoly.

And so, when we approached this task, when the Soviet power clearly raised these questions, when it said: comrades workers, organize, unite the food forces, fight against every case when such detachments turn out to be not up to the calling, organize more firmly and correct your shortcomings, unite around yourselves the rural poor. The kulaks know that their last hour is coming, when the enemy comes out not only with preaching, with words and phrases, but with the organization of the rural poor. – If we organize it, then we will win over the kulaks. The kulaks know that here comes the moment of the most decisive, the most final, the most desperate struggle for socialism. It seems that this is only a struggle for bread; in fact, it is a struggle for socialism. If the workers learn to solve such tasks independently, – no one will come to their aid, – if they learn to unite around themselves the rural poor, then there will be victory, and bread, and the correct distribution of bread, even the correct distribution of labor, because, distributing it correctly, we will dominate all areas of labor, in all areas of industry.

So, foreseeing this, the kulaks have repeatedly tried to bribe the poor. They know that the state needs to sell bread for 6 rubles; they sell it to a neighbor, an impoverished peasant, for 3 rubles and tell him: "You can go to speculators and you can sell for 40 rubles; our interests are common; we must be together against the state that robs us; they want to give us 6 rubles, you take three poods and you can earn 60 rubles, and how much I will earn – you should not know about this, it is my business."

On this basis, I know, it happens repeatedly that it comes to a military clash of peasants, and the enemies of the Soviet power gloat and giggle at this and make every effort to overthrow the Soviet power. And we say: this is because the detachments went insufficiently conscious, but the more detachments there were, the more often cases were observed, – and they were observed repeatedly, – that bread was given without a single case of violence, because conscious workers pay attention to the fact that they are not rapists, that their main strength is that they are representatives of the organized, enlightened poor, and in the village there is a mass of darkness, the poor are not enlightened. If you know how to approach it, if you tell it in a language without bookish words, simply, humanly explain that in Petrograd, Moscow, in dozens of districts tens of thousands of Russian peasants and workers are starving and reaching starvation typhus, to starvation, death, that it is unfair for the rich to withhold bread, to speculate on the people's hunger, then it will be possible to organize the poor, to do what the surplus bread will be collected and that this will be done not by violence, but by the organization of the rural poor. Against the rural kulaks, I have to listen repeatedly to reports from comrades who come to the places with food detachments and fight against the counter-revolution. I will allow myself to give the example that is especially alive in my memory, because I had to hear yesterday about what was in the Yelets district{165}. There, thanks to the organization of the Soviet of Deputies, thanks to the fact that there were conscious workers and the poorest peasants in sufficient numbers, it was possible to consolidate the power of the poor. When I had representatives of the Yelets district with a report for the first time, I did not believe them, I thought that people were boasting, but comrades specially sent from Moscow to other provinces confirmed to me that one can only welcome their setting up of the matter, confirmed that there are such districts in Russia where the local Soviets of Deputies turned out to be up to the task, having managed to achieve the complete elimination of kulaks and exploiters from the Soviets and to organize the working people, to organize the poor. Whoever uses his wealth for profit, let him go away from the Soviet power! (Applause.)

When they drove out the kulaks, they went to the city of Yelets, a trading city, and there, to implement the grain monopoly, they did not wait for a decree, but remembered that the Soviets are a power close to the people, that everyone should, if he is a revolutionary, if he is a socialist and, indeed, a supporter of the working people, act quickly and decisively. They organized all the workers and the poorest peasants and put forward such a number of detachments that searches were carried out throughout Yelets; they let into the houses only trusted and responsible leaders of the detachments; they did not let in a single person in whom they were not convinced, knowing how often there is hesitation, knowing that nothing disgraces the Soviet power so much as these cases of robbery by representatives and unworthy servants of the Soviet power. They succeeded in collecting huge surpluses of bread, – that there was not a single house left in the trading Yelets where the bourgeoisie could benefit from speculation.

Of course, I know that it is much easier to do this in a small city than in a city like Moscow, but one should not forget that there cannot be such a proletarian force as there is in Moscow in any district city.

So, in Tambov, the counter-revolution recently won for a few hours; it even released a Menshevik and Right SR issue of the newspaper, which called for the Constituent Assembly, for the overthrow of the Soviet power and said how strong the victory of the new power was, until the Red Army soldiers and peasants came from the district and in one day drove away this new, "strong", supposedly based on the Constituent Assembly power. (Applause.)

Similarly, comrades, the situation was in other districts of the Tambov province, a province of enormous size. Its northern districts adjoin the non-agricultural zone, the southern districts are unusually fertile; the harvest there is very large. There are many peasants there who have a surplus of bread, and there it is necessary to know how to approach with special energy, with a particularly firm and clear consciousness, to rely on the poorest peasants, to defeat the kulaks. There the kulaks feel hostility to any worker and peasant power, there one has to wait for the help of Petrograd and Moscow workers, who every time, supported by the weapon of their organization, expel the kulaks from the Soviets, organize the poor and experience, together with the local peasantry, the experience of the struggle for the state monopoly of bread, the experience of organizing the rural poor and the working people of the city, such an organization that will give us the last complete victory. And here, comrades, I allowed myself to tell you in these examples how things stand in the food relation, because it seems to me that the characteristic of the struggle for bread, from the point of view of the working people, against the kulaks, is important for us, for the workers, for the conscious proletariat, not by those separate numerical data of calculations, how many millions of poods can be obtained. I must leave this matter to the food specialist, I must say that if it were possible to obtain surpluses of bread from those provinces that adjoin the Moscow non-agricultural zone and grain-producing Siberia, even here in these difficult weeks that remain for us until the new harvest, we would find enough bread to save the hungry non-agricultural provinces from starvation death. For this, it is necessary to organize an even greater number of conscious advanced workers. This is the basic lesson of all past revolutions, this is the basic lesson of our revolution as well. The more organization there is, the wider it manifests itself, the better the workers in factories and plants will be able to understand that strength is only in the organization of them and the rural poor, the more certain will be the cause of the struggle against famine and the cause of the struggle for socialism, for, I repeat, our task is not to invent a new power, but to raise, enlighten, organize every representative of the rural poor, in a remote village, for independent actions. It is not difficult to explain to several conscious urban workers, Petrograd and Moscow, even in a remote village, how unfair it is to withhold bread, to speculate on it, to turn it into a means for moonshine, when hundreds of thousands are dying in Moscow. To achieve this, the workers of Petrograd, Moscow, you, comrades, especially, representatives of factory committees, representatives of the most diverse professions, factories and plants, you must only firmly assimilate and clarify that no one will come to your aid, that not helpers, but enemies are going to you from another class, that the Soviet power has no devoted intelligentsia in its service. The intelligentsia carries its experience and knowledge – the highest human dignity – to the service of the exploiters and uses everything to make it difficult for us to win over the exploiters; it will achieve that hundreds of thousands of people will die of hunger, but it will not break the resistance of the working people. We have no one except the class with which we achieved the revolution, with which we will go through the greatest difficulties ahead of us, the most difficult period – this is the factory, urban and rural proletariat, which speaks in a language understandable to each other, which both in the city and in the countryside will be able to defeat all enemies – kulaks and the rich.

But, in order to do this, one must remember how often the workers forget the basic provision of the socialist revolution: in order to make a socialist revolution, in order to carry it out, to save the people from oppression, it is not necessary to immediately destroy the classes, the most conscious and organized workers must take power into their own hands. In the state, the workers must become the ruling class. This is the truth that most of you have already read in the "Communist Manifesto" by Marx and Engels, which was written more than seventy years ago and has gone around all countries and all languages. Everywhere the truth has been revealed: in order to defeat the capitalists, it is necessary that the organized urban factory workers become the ruling class for the time of the struggle against exploitation, while it is dark, while they do not yet believe in the new order. When you gather in your factory committees to solve your affairs, remember that the revolution will not retain any of its conquests if you engage in technical or purely financial workers' interests in your factory committees. It has happened more than once that the workers and the oppressed classes managed to take power into their own hands, but it has never happened that they managed to retain it. For this, it is necessary that the workers possess not only the ability to rise to a heroic struggle and overthrow exploitation, but also the ability to organize, to discipline, to endurance, the ability to discuss, when everything around is staggering, hesitating, when you are attacked, when absurd endless rumors grow, – at this time the greatest state task lies on the factory committees, which are closely connected with the broad million-strong mass, to become, first of all, the organ of management of state life. This is the main state question of the Soviet power – how to ensure the correct distribution of bread. If Yelets managed to curb the local bourgeoisie, then it is more difficult to do this in Moscow, but here the organization is immeasurably greater, and here you can more easily put forward tens of thousands of honest people, whom your parties, your trade unions will give and will be able to guarantee, who will be able to lead the detachments with full responsibility for the fact that they remain ideological, devoted people, despite any difficulties, despite any temptations, on the one hand, and the torments of hunger, on the other. There is no other class that could now take on this matter, that would be able to lead the people, often falling into despair, there is no other class except the factory, urban and rural proletariat. Your factory committees must cease to be only factory committees, they must become the main state cells of the ruling class. (Applause.) Your organization, your cohesion, your energy depend on the fact that we will endure the difficult transition as steadfastly as the Soviet power should endure. Take on the matter yourselves, take on it from every side, expose abuses every day, correct every mistake made with your own experience, – there are many of them being made now, because the working class is not yet experienced, but it is important that it takes on the matter itself