V. I. Lenin

Speech In Memory Of Y. M. Sverdlov

At A Special Session Of

The All-Russia Central Executive Committee

March 18, 1919

Comrades, today, when the workers of all countries are honouring the memory of the heroic rise and tragic end of the
Paris Commune we have to inter the remains of Yakov Mikhailovich
Sverdlov. In the course of our revolution, and in its victories,
Comrade Sverdlov succeeded in expressing more fully and integrally
than anybody else the chief and most important features of the
proletarian revolution, and this, even more than his boundless
devotion to the cause of the revolution, made him significant as a
leader of the proletarian revolution.

Comrades, people who judge by what they see on the surface,
the numerous enemies of our revolution, and those who to this day
vacillate between the revolution and its opponents, consider the
most striking feature of our revolution to be the determined and
relentlessly firm way it has dealt with the exploiters and the
enemies of the working people. There is no doubt that without
this, without revolutionary violence, the proletariat could not
have triumphed. Nor can there be any doubt that revolutionary
violence was a necessary and legitimate weapon of the revolution
only at definite stages of its development, only under definite
and special conditions, and that a far more profound and permanent
feature of this revolution and condition of its victory was, and
remains, the organisation of the proletarian masses, the
organisation of the working people.

And it is this organisation of millions of working people that
constitutes the best stimulant for the revolution, its deepest
source of victory. And it is this feature of the proletarian
revolution which, in the course of the struggle, brought to the
fore those leaders who best expressed that specific feature of
our revolution that was never seen in revolutions before,
namely, the organisation of the masses. This feature of the
proletarian revolution also brought to the fore Yakov Sverdlov,
a man who was first and foremost an organiser.

Comrades, we Russian revolutionaries, particularly in the
stern days of the prolonged, sometimes painful and excessively
long period of preparation for the revolution, suffered because
of the gulf between theory, principle and programme and our
practical work. We suffered most of all from a too deep
engrossment in theory divorced from direct action.

The history of the Russian revolutionary movement over a
period of many decades contains a list of martyrs who were
devoted to the revolutionary cause, but who had no opportunity
to put their revolutionary ideals into practice. In this
respect, the proletarian revolution, for the first time,
provided these formerly isolated heroes of the revolutionary
struggle with real ground, a real basis, a real environment, a
real audience, and a real proletarian army in which they could
display their talents. And in this respect, the most outstanding
leaders are those who, as practical, efficient organisers, have
succeeded in winning for themselves an exceptionally prominent
place such as Yakov Sverdlov won for himself and rightly
occupied.

If we survey the life of this leader of the proletarian
revolution we see that his wonderful organising talents
developed in the course of long struggle. We see that this
leader of the proletarian revolution himself cultivated every
one of his wonderful gifts as a great revolutionary who had
passed through and experienced different epochs in the severest
conditions of revolutionary activity. He dedicated himself
entirely to the revolution in the very first period of his
activities, when still a youth who had barely acquired political
consciousness. In that period, at the very beginning of the
twentieth century, Comrade Sverdlov stood before us as the most
perfect type of professional revolutionary, a man who had
entirely given up his family and all the comforts and habits of
the old bourgeois society, a man who devoted himself heart and
soul to the revolution, and who for many years, even decades,
passing from prison to exile and from exile to prison, cultivated those characteristics which steeled revolutionaries
for many, many years.

However, this professional revolutionary never, not even for
a moment, lost contact with the masses. Although the conditions
of tsarism condemned him, like all the revolutionaries of those
days, mainly to underground, illegal activities, even then, even
in those underground and illegal activities, Sverdlov always
marched shoulder to shoulder and hand in hand with the advanced
workers who, at the beginning of the twentieth century, began to
take the place of the earlier generation of revolutionary
intellectuals.

It was at this time that scores and hundreds of advanced
workers took up activities and acquired that steel-like hardness
in the revolutionary struggle which, together with the closest
contact with the masses, made it possible to bring about a
successful proletarian revolution in Russia. It is precisely
this long period of illegal activity that most of all characterises the man who was constantly in the fight, who never
lost contact with the masses, who never left Russia, who always
worked in conjunction with the best of the workers, and who, in
spite of the isolation from general life to which persecution
condemned the revolutionary, succeeded in becoming not only a
beloved leader of the workers, not only a leader who was most
familiar with practical work, but also an organiser of the
advanced proletarians. Some people were of the opinion—and
this applies mostly to our opponents, or to the waverers—that this complete absorption in illegal
activities, this specific feature of the professional revolutionary, cut him off from the masses. But the
revolutionary activities of Yakov Sverdlov prove to us how
utterly mistaken this opinion was, that, on the contrary, this
boundless devotion to the revolutionary cause, which is typical
of the lives of people who had seen the inside of many prisons
and had been in exile in the remotest regions of Siberia,
produced such leaders, the flower of our proletariat. And when this was combined with a knowledge of
men and organisational ability, it produced great organisers. The illegal circles, revolutionary underground
work, the illegal Party, which nobody personified or expressed
so integrally as Yakov Sverdlov—this was the practical school through which he passed, and the only school that could
have enabled him to reach the position of the first man in the
first socialist Soviet Republic, the position of the first
organiser of the broad proletarian masses.

Comrades, all those who, like myself, have had occasion to
work with Comrade Sverdlov day after day, had it vividly brought
home to them that it was the exceptional organising talent of
this man which gave us that which we have been so proud of, so
justly proud of, up to now. He made it possible for us to carry
on concerted, efficient, really organised activities, activities
worthy of the organised proletarian masses, and answering to the
requirements of the proletarian revolution—those concerted, organised activities without which we could not have
achieved a single success, without which we could not have
overcome any one of the innumerable difficulties which we have
had to face, and without which we would not have been able to
stand up to any one of the severe trials we experienced in the
past, and are experiencing at the present time.

In that seething struggle that is revolution, at that special post which every revolutionary occupies, at a time when
the work of even a small body of men takes the form of deliberations, of enormous importance is high moral prestige won
in the course of the struggle, unquestionable and unchallenged
prestige, the roots of which lie, of course not in abstract
morals, but in the morals of the revolutionary fighter, the
morals of the rank and file of the revolutionary masses.

The fact that for over a year we have been able to bear the
incredible burdens that have fallen to the lot of a narrow
circle of devoted revolutionaries, the fact that the leading
groups could so firmly, quickly, and unanimously decide the most
difficult problems, is due entirely to the prominent place among
them occupied by such an exceptionally talented organiser as
Yakov Sverdlov. He alone managed to acquire an amazing knowledge
of the leading men of the proletarian movement, he alone, in
the course of the long years of struggle—to which I can
refer here only very briefly—succeeded in acquiring the
wonderful intuition of the practical worker, the wonderful
talent of an organiser, an absolutely unchallenged prestige,
thanks to which he was able to take sole charge of some of the
largest branches of the work of the All-Russia Central Executive
Committee which only a group of ordinary people could cope
with. He alone succeeded in winning for himself such a position
that on a large number of extremely big and important practical
questions of organisation, his mere word was sufficient to
secure an unchallenged and final settlement, without conferences, without a formal vote; and everybody felt convinced
that the questions had been settled on the basis of such
profound practical knowledge and organising intuition that not
only hundreds and thousands of advanced workers, but also the
masses would accept that settlement as final.

History long ago proved that in the course of the struggle
great revolutions bring great men to the forefront and develop
talents that had previously seemed impossible. Nobody would have
believed that the school of the illegal study circle and
underground activities, the school of the small, persecuted
Party, the school of Turukhansk prison could produce this
organiser who won absolutely unchallenged prestige, the
organiser of Soviet power throughout Russia, the man, unique in
his knowledge, who organised the work of the Party which created
the Soviets and established the Soviet government which is now
making its arduous, painful, bloody but triumphant advance to
all nations, to all countries throughout the world.

We shall never be able to replace this man who had cultivated such an exceptional organising talent, if by
replacement we mean finding one man, one comrade, with all these
qualities. Nobody who has been close to Yakov Sverdlov and has
watched him constantly at work can have any doubt that in this
respect he is irreplaceable. The work he performed as an
organiser, in choosing men and appointing them to responsible
posts in all the various departments, will be performed in
future only if we appoint whole groups of men to handle the
different major departments that he had sole charge of, and if
these men, following in his footsteps, come near to doing what
this one man did alone.

But the proletarian revolution is strong precisely because
its roots run deep. We know that it promotes new men to take the
place of those who devotedly sacrificed their lives in the
struggle, they are perhaps less experienced, possess less
knowledge, and are at first less trained, but they are men who
have broad contacts with the masses and who are capable of
promoting from their ranks groups of men to take the place of
the departed geniuses, to continue their cause, to continue
along the road they pursued and to complete what they had
begun. In this respect we are fully convinced that the proletarian revolution in Russia and all over the world will
promote group after group of men, numerous sections of the
proletariat and of the working peasantry, which will possess
that practical knowledge of life, that organising talent,
collective if not individual, without which the million-strong
army of the proletariat cannot achieve victory.

The memory of Comrade Yakov Sverdlov will serve not only as
a permanent symbol of the revolutionary’s devotion to his
cause and as the model of how to combine a practical sober mind,
practical skill, close contact with the masses and ability to
guide them; it is also a pledge that ever-growing numbers of
proletarians, guided by these examples, will march forward to
the complete victory of the world communist revolution.