Comrade Sosnovskiy, editor of *Bednota*{168}, brought me a remarkable book. It is necessary to acquaint the broadest possible number of workers and peasants with it. From it one must extract the most serious lessons on the most important questions of socialist construction, excellently elucidated by vivid examples. This is the book by Comrade Aleksandr Todorskiy: "A Year—with Rifle and Plow," published in the little town of Vesyegonsk by the local district soviet there on the occasion of the anniversary of the October Revolution.

The author describes a year's experience of the leaders of work on the construction of Soviet power in Vesyegonsk district—first the civil war, the uprising of local kulaks and its suppression, then the "peaceful construction of life." The author's description of the course of revolution in a backwoods district turned out to be so simple and yet so vivid that to retell it would only weaken the impression. It is necessary to disseminate this book more widely and to express the wish that as large a number of workers as possible, who have acted in the masses and with the masses, in the thick of living life itself, would undertake to describe their experience. The publication of several hundreds or at least several dozens of the best, most truthful, most artless, most rich in valuable factual content of such descriptions would be infinitely more useful for the cause of socialism than many of the newspaper, journal, and book works of professional scribblers, who all too often cannot see life for the paper.

I shall take one small example from the account of Comrade A. Todorskiy. The matter concerned not leaving "merchant hands" "unemployed," but compelling them to "take up work."

"...For these purposes, three young, energetic, and especially capable industrialists, E. E. Efremov, A. K. Loginov, and N. M. Kozlov, were summoned to the soviet, and under threat of loss of freedom and confiscation of all property were engaged in the creation of a sawmill and a chrome (leather-tanning) factory, for the equipment of which work was immediately begun.

Soviet power did not err in its choice of workers, and the industrialists, to their credit, were among the first to understand that they were dealing not with 'two-week chance visitors,' but with real masters who had taken power firmly in hand.

Having fully grasped this, they energetically set about executing the orders of the soviet, and at the present time Vesyegonsk has a sawmill running at full capacity, serving all the local population's needs and fulfilling orders from the newly constructed railway.

As for the chrome factory, the premises have now been equipped and the installation of the engine, drums, and other machinery, delivered from Moscow, is underway, and within a month and a half to two months, Vesyegonsk will have chrome leather of its own production.

The equipment of two Soviet factories by 'non-Soviet' hands serves as a good example of how one must struggle against a class hostile to us.

This is still only half the job if we strike the exploiters on the hands, neutralize them or 'finish them off.' The task will be successfully completed when we force them to work, and by the work accomplished by their hands, we help improve the new life and strengthen Soviet power."

This excellent and deeply correct reasoning ought to be carved on boards and posted in every sovnarkhoz, food administration, every factory, every land department, and so forth. For what the comrades in the backwoods town of Vesyegonsk understood, Soviet workers in the capitals stubbornly refuse to understand all too often. It is no rarity to meet a Soviet intellectual or worker, a communist, who wrinkles his nose disdainfully at the mention of cooperation, declaring with extraordinary self-importance—and with equally great stupidity—that these are not Soviet hands, that these are bourgeois, shopkeepers, Mensheviks, that in this or that place, cooperators covered up their aid to the White Guards with their financial machinations, that the apparatus of supply and distribution in our socialist republic must be built by pure Soviet hands.

Such reasoning is typical in that truth is mixed here with falsehood in such a way as to produce the most dangerous distortion of the tasks of communism, causing immense harm to our cause.

Yes, cooperation is an apparatus of bourgeois society, grown in the atmosphere of "shopkeeping," which has educated its leaders in the spirit of bourgeois politics and bourgeois worldview, and therefore yields a high percentage of White Guards or White Guard sympathizers. This is indisputable. But the trouble is when, from an indisputable truth, through simplification and clumsy application of it, one begins to draw absurd conclusions. We cannot build communism except out of the materials created by capitalism, except out of that cultural apparatus which has been cultivated by the bourgeois environment and therefore inevitably—when it comes to human material as part of the cultural apparatus—is saturated with bourgeois psychology. Herein lies the difficulty of building communist society, but herein also lies the guarantee of the possibility and success of its construction. This is precisely what distinguishes Marxism from old utopian socialism—that the latter wished to build new society not out of those mass representatives of human material which are created by bloody, dirty, predatory, shopkeeper capitalism, but out of specially selected and cultivated in particular hothouses and greenhouses especially virtuous people. This ridiculous idea is now laughable to all and abandoned by all, but not everyone wishes or is able to think through the opposite doctrine of Marxism—to think through how one can (and must) build communism out of mass human material, corrupted by centuries and millennia of slavery, serfdom, capitalism, petty fragmented management, war of all against all over a place in the market, over a higher price for a product or for labor.

Cooperation is a bourgeois apparatus. From this it follows that it does not deserve political trust, but it by no means follows that one is permitted to turn away from the task of using it for purposes of administration and construction. Political mistrust leads to the fact that one cannot give politically responsible posts to non-Soviet people. It leads to the fact that the extraordinary commissions carefully watch representatives of classes, strata, or groups tending toward White Guardism. (Incidentally, one need not go so far as the absurdities which Comrade Latsis, one of the best, tested communists, wrote in his Kazan journal "Red Terror"{169}—he wanted to say that red terror is violent suppression of exploiters attempting to restore their rule, but instead wrote on page 2 in No. 1 of his journal: "do not seek (!!?) in the case of accusation evidence as to whether he rose up against the Soviet by weapon or by word".)

Political mistrust toward representatives of the bourgeois apparatus is lawful and necessary. Refusal to use them for the work of administration and construction is the greatest stupidity, causing the greatest harm to communism. Whoever wished to recommend a Menshevik as a socialist or as a political leader, or even as a political adviser, would commit an enormous error, for the history of revolution in Russia has proven conclusively that Mensheviks (and Socialist-Revolutionaries) are not socialists but petty-bourgeois democrats, capable of, at every serious intensification of class struggle between the proletariat and bourgeoisie, taking the side of the bourgeoisie. But petty-bourgeois democracy is not an accidental political formation, not some kind of exception, but a necessary product of capitalism, and moreover—not only the old, pre-capitalist, economically reactionary middle peasantry is a "supplier" of this democracy, but also the culturally-capitalist cooperation, growing on the soil of large-scale capitalism, the intelligentsia, and so forth. After all, even in backward Russia, alongside the Kolupaevs and Razuvaevs, there were born capitalists who knew how to put cultured intelligentsia to their service—Menshevik, Socialist-Revolutionary, non-party. Shall we prove to be more foolish than these capitalists and be unable to use such "building material" for the construction of communist Russia?

Written in late 1918 or early 1919

First published November 7, 1926 in the newspaper *Pravda* No. 258

Printed from the manuscript