All the opposition's objections regarding my report begin with the question of the Brest Treaty. But such a formulation of the question could be called businesslike only if it led to practical results. Yet all their speeches on this matter produce no results and cannot produce any. (Applause.)

If it had happened that the Left Socialist-Revolutionary party had obtained the majority, it would not be shouting about this question as it is shouting now. One must speak of the genuine achievements of the Soviet Republic on the path to socialism, and we can assert—and not one of the speakers denied this—that in this respect, since the last congress, great progress has been achieved. The opposition representatives did not dispute either that all those standing for the break-up of the Brest peace are acting in the interests of restoring the power of landowners and capitalists, and are bolstered by the support of Anglo-French imperialism. When I said that the Czechoslovaks are also seeking this break-up for 10-15 million—no one refuted it. And how could one refute the fact that the Czechoslovaks, cloaking themselves in the slogan of a Constituent Assembly, aim to drag us into war?

The Left Socialist-Revolutionaries said that an army cannot be created in a short time, but the matter depends on how soon we set things right with fuel, how the peasants settle down, how things go with the harvest.

Your appeals for the creation of partisan detachments to fight against a regular imperialist army are ridiculous to every soldier.

When we are forced to return to the question of the Brest peace, we say: "This peace will be broken if you overthrow Soviet Power, and this will not happen!" (Applause.) Only then, on the basis of breaking the Brest peace, will you be able to drag the toiling masses into war to the joy of landowners, capitalists, and White Guards, bribed with millions of Anglo-French imperialists. The disruption of the Brest peace now will in fact rest upon forces hostile to the toiling classes. All disagreements about the Brest peace cannot be considered businesslike. This is merely the hysteria of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries.

When someone said here that the Bolsheviks are making concessions and that in their reports they announced nothing businesslike, I recall words spoken here by some Socialist-Revolutionary, it seems a Maximalist, to the effect that in the Supreme Council of the National Economy we are transitioning from control to the management of production.{186} Is this not a businesslike statement? What are those workers doing who, through their own efforts via trade unions, have set about learning from those in charge the business of managing enterprises? You say that learning to manage is nothing difficult, yet in the Supreme Council of the National Economy we resolve thousands of conflicts and instances daily which show that the worker has learned much, and drawing conclusions from this, we arrive at the fact that workers are beginning to learn, slowly it is true, with mistakes, but it is one thing to utter a phrase and another to see month after month how gradually the worker enters into his role, begins to lose his timidity, and begins to feel himself a ruler. Whether correctly or not, he is doing the work the way a peasant does in an agricultural commune. Time shows that the worker had to learn to manage industry, and everything else is the emptiest phrase, worth a kopeck. If within half a year of Soviet Power we have reached the point that we now approach the obsolescence of control—this is already an enormous step forward.

Here they shouted that we are marking time and retreating. Nothing of the sort. You might convince a kulak of this, but not an ordinary worker; he knows that when we say: give us better people than those you sent, make them study better than you do. Therefore, when they shout here to us about concessions, permit me then to ask any worker and peasant what they prefer: to pay the debt which the Germans imposed upon us by means of concessions, or to wage war? When we concluded the Brest peace, we spoke of the imperialists: so long as they have not been defeated by the international socialist revolution, we cannot defend ourselves except through retreat. This is unpleasant, but it is a fact—and it is better when we speak this phrase to the people—until we have built an army which can be created not in decades of years but in years, if there is created a proper distribution of grain, so that grain supplies are collected for the army and accumulated. In what district, in what province have the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries done this? Nothing of the sort! Until this is done, we say that all your shouts are the emptiest phrase, and when we take steps in workers' management, we take a step forward. Here they misquoted my phrase. I said that a party is bad in which sincere people are forced to descend to such phrases.

That we gave a billion to our Commissariat of Food—is this not a step forward? Much is still not in order, and if you wish, you will be able to set it in order. Through whom—I do not know. Not through old bureaucrats? Our workers and peasants from the Soviets are learning this business (applause) and therefore the purchase of manufactures and the appropriation of funds do their work. We have examined the question hundreds of times in the Council of People's Commissars: through whom to buy manufactures, how to conduct control, how to aid its speedier distribution? And we know that week after week we successfully worked out measures for combating speculation, measures for catching speculators, and that workers in this business become firmer with each month, and no one can deny our success in this. We are moving forward, not marking time. On 28 June we carried out nationalization{187} perhaps to the extent of several hundred million, and you still object and again repeat the words of bourgeois intellectuals. Socialism is work which is not produced in a few months. We are not marking time but continue to move toward socialism, and after the Brest Treaty we have come closer to it. Workers have experience from a series of mistakes, consciousness of responsibility, the difficulty of struggle, and peasants have experience in the socialization of land, and, undoubtedly, more experienced and rational peasants say: we took land ourselves in the first spring, and in autumn we will take into our own hands the whole business, the business of land distribution. After all, we give peasants manufactures at 50 percent, that is, at half price, and who would give manufactures to poor peasants at this price? And we will move toward socialism through the path of grain, manufactures, and implements, not going to speculators but going first and foremost to the poor. This is socialism. (Applause.) After half a year of socialist revolution, people who think from books understand nothing. We have come to such a point that from the concrete step of distributing grain and exchanging manufactures for grain we are acting so that the poor benefit, not the rich speculators. We are not a bourgeois republic, because for that there would be no need for Soviets. In the distribution of grain and manufactures it is necessary that the poor benefit, and not a single republic in the world has tried to do this, but we are trying it now. (Applause.) We are doing a noble deed, we have experience, and we are doing everything so that the poor become organized. Cases of robbery and hooliganism are almost eliminated, and for every such case there are ten cases when poor and middle peasants say: we must liberate ourselves from the kulak and the landowner! Since the Brest peace we have taken enormous steps forward in the matter of instructing peasants, and they are now no novices in the matter of struggle for socialism.