(Stormy, prolonged applause; shouts: “Long live Ilyich!”, “Long live Comrade Lenin!”.) Comrades, permit me to begin with the political report of the Central Committee. To present a report on the political activity of the Central Committee since the last congress means, essentially, to give an account of our entire revolution. And I think everyone will agree with me that to fulfill such a task single-handedly is not only beyond one’s strength in so short a period, but indeed no one could cope with such a task alone. I have therefore decided to confine myself only to points which, in my opinion, are especially important not only for the history of what our Party has had to do over this period, but also from the standpoint of present tasks. To devote myself entirely to history at a time like the one we are living through, to recall the past without thinking of the present and the future, would, I confess, be more than I could manage.

If we begin with foreign policy, it goes without saying that our relations with German imperialism and the Brest Peace stand in the first place. And it seems to me that this question is worth discussing, for it is of more than merely historical significance. It seems to me that the proposal made by the Soviet power to the allied powers, or, rather, the consent which our government gave to the well-known proposal regarding a conference on the Princes’ Islands, – it seems to me that this proposal and our reply in some, and quite essential, respect reproduce the attitude towards imperialism that we established at the time of the Brest Peace. That is why I think it necessary to touch on this history amid the present rapid pace of events.

When the question of the Brest Peace was being decided, Soviet construction, to say nothing of Party construction, was still in its first stage. You know that at that time the Party as a whole still had very little experience for determining, even approximately, the speed of our advance along the path upon which we had embarked. The inevitable disorganisation inherited from the past still made it extremely difficult then to survey events and to obtain precise information about what was happening. And the enormous isolation from Western Europe and all other countries gave us no objective material for judging the possible speed or forms of the maturing of the proletarian revolution in the West. From this complex situation it followed that the question of the Brest Peace gave rise to no few disagreements in our Party.

But events proved that this forced retreat before German imperialism, which cloaked itself in an extremely violent, outrageous, predatory peace, that this retreat, from the standpoint of the young socialist republic’s attitude to world imperialism (to one half of world imperialism), was the only correct one. At that time we, who had just overthrown the landlords and bourgeoisie in Russia, were left with absolutely no other choice than to retreat before the forces of world imperialism. Those who condemned this retreat from a revolutionary standpoint were in reality standing on a fundamentally incorrect and non-Marxist position. They forgot under what conditions, after what a long and difficult development of the Kerensky period, at what cost of enormous preparatory work in the Soviets, we had arrived at the point where, after the heavy July defeats, after the Kornilov affair, there had fully matured at last, in October, among the vast masses of the working people, the resolve and the readiness to overthrow the bourgeoisie and the material organised force necessary for this. It is understandable that nothing of the kind could then be spoken of on an international scale. From this point of view, the task of struggle against world imperialism stood as follows: to continue to act in the sense of disintegrating this imperialism, in the sense of enlightening and uniting the working class, which had everywhere begun to stir, but had as yet not acquired full definiteness in its actions.

That is why the only correct policy proved to be the one we undertook in relation to Brest, although, of course, this policy exacerbated our enmity at that time with a whole series of petty-bourgeois elements, which by no means under all conditions and by no means in all countries are, can be, and must be opponents of socialism. Here history has given us a lesson that we must thoroughly assimilate, for there is no doubt that we shall have to make use of it more than once. This lesson consists in the fact that the relations of the proletarian party to the petty-bourgeois democratic party, to those elements, strata, groups, classes which in Russia are particularly strong and numerous and which exist in all countries, that these relations constitute an extremely complex and difficult task. The petty-bourgeois elements vacillate between the old society and the new. They can be the motive force of neither the old society nor the new. At the same time, they are adherents of the old not to the same degree as the landlords and bourgeoisie. Patriotism is a feeling that is linked with the economic conditions of life precisely of the small proprietors. The bourgeoisie is more international than the small proprietors. We had to come up against this in the epoch of the Brest Peace, when the Soviet power placed the world dictatorship of the proletariat and the world revolution above all national sacrifices, however heavy they might be. At the same time, we had to come into the sharpest and most ruthless collision with the petty-bourgeois elements. At that time a whole number of such elements, which afterwards began to vacillate, coalesced against us together with the bourgeoisie and the landlords.

The question, raised here by certain comrades, of the attitude towards the petty-bourgeois parties is touched upon to a considerable degree by our programme and will, in essence, be touched upon in discussing each of the items on the agenda. This question has, in the course of our revolution, lost its abstractness, its generality, and become concrete. In the epoch of the Brest Peace, our task as internationalists consisted in enabling the proletarian elements, at all costs, to grow stronger and to unite. This is what broke the petty-bourgeois parties away from us at that time. We know how, after the German revolution, the petty-bourgeois elements again began to vacillate. These events opened the eyes of many who, in the epoch of the maturing proletarian revolution, judged from the standpoint of the old patriotism, judged not only non-socialistically, but also quite incorrectly in general. Now, again, in connection with the difficult food situation, in connection with the war that is still continuing against the Entente, we are again living through a wave of vacillation of petty-bourgeois democracy. We have had to reckon with these vacillations before, but – and here a lesson of enormous importance follows for all of us – old situations do not repeat themselves in their former guise. The new situation is more complex. It can be correctly assessed, and our policy can be correct, if we arm ourselves with the experience of the Brest Peace. When we replied with consent to the proposal of a conference on the Princes’ Islands, we knew that we were going towards a peace of an extremely violent character. But, on the other hand, we now know more about how the revolutionary proletarian wave is rising in Western Europe, how ferment there is turning into conscious discontent, how it is leading to the organisation of a world Soviet proletarian movement. If at that time we were groping, if at that time we were guessing as to when the revolution might break out in Europe – guessing on the basis of our theoretical conviction that this revolution must occur – we now already have a whole series of facts showing how the revolution is maturing in other countries, and how this movement has begun. That is why, in relation to Western Europe, to the Entente countries, we have to, or will have to, repeat much of what we did during the Brest Peace. After the Brest experience it will be much easier for us to do this. When our Central Committee had to discuss the question of participating in a conference on the Princes’ Islands together with the Whites – which, in essence, was tantamount to the annexation of everything occupied by the Whites – this question of an armistice did not arouse a single indignant voice among the proletariat, and the Party took the same attitude. At least I have not heard of dissatisfaction or indignation from anywhere. This happened because our lesson in international politics had borne fruit.

As for the petty-bourgeois elements, here the Party’s task is not yet finally solved. In a whole number of questions, in fact in all the questions on the agenda without exception, we have during the past year created the foundation for a correct solution of this task, especially in relation to the middle peasant. Theoretically we have agreed that the middle peasant is not our enemy, that he requires a special attitude to himself, that matters here will change depending on the numerous concomitant moments of the revolution, in particular in connection with the solution of the question: for patriotism or against patriotism? For us these are questions of secondary or even tertiary importance, but they absolutely blind the petty bourgeoisie. On the other hand, all these elements vacillate in the struggle and become completely characterless. They do not know what they want and are incapable of upholding their position. Here a tactic exceedingly flexible, exceedingly cautious, is required of us, for sometimes we have to give with one hand and take away with the other. The blame for this falls not on us, but on those petty-bourgeois elements who cannot gather their forces. We see this in practice now, and still today we had to read in the newspapers what the German Independents, who have such major figures as Kautsky and Hilferding, have begun striving for. You know that they wanted to incorporate the system of Soviets into the constitution of the German democratic republic, i.e., to marry in law the “Constituent Assembly” and the dictatorship of the proletariat. To us, this is such a mockery of the good sense of our revolution, the German revolution, the Hungarian revolution, the maturing Polish revolution, that we can only throw up our hands. We can say that these vacillating elements exist in the most advanced countries. Sometimes educated, developed, intellectual elements, even in such a capitalistically advanced country as Germany, act a hundred times more muddle-headedly and clamorously than our backward petty bourgeoisie. Hence a lesson for Russia with regard to the petty-bourgeois parties and the middle peasantry. Our task for a long time will be complex and dual. These parties for a long time will inevitably take one step forward and two steps back, because they are doomed to this by their economic position, because they by no means go over to socialism out of an absolute conviction of the worthlessness of the bourgeois system. Devotion to socialism – that is something we need not ask of them. To count on their socialism is ridiculous. They will go over to socialism only when they are convinced that there is no other way, when the bourgeoisie is finally smashed and suppressed.

I am not in a position to sum up systematically the experience of the past year; I have looked back at the past only from the standpoint of what will be needed for our policy tomorrow or the day after. The chief lesson is to be exceedingly cautious in our attitude to the middle peasantry and to the petty bourgeoisie. This is demanded by the experience of the past; this has been experienced on the example of Brest. We will be required to change our line of conduct frequently, which to a superficial observer may seem strange and incomprehensible. “How is this,” he will say, “yesterday you were making promises to the petty bourgeoisie, and today Dzerzhinsky announces that the Left S.R.s and Mensheviks will be put against the wall. What a contradiction!...” Yes, a contradiction. But the conduct of the petty-bourgeois democracy itself is contradictory, it does not know where to sit, tries to perch between two stools, jumps from one to the other and falls now to the right, now to the left. We have changed our tactics towards it, and every time it turns to us we say to it: “You are welcome.” We do not in the least want to expropriate the middle peasantry; we do not at all wish to use violence against the petty-bourgeois democracy. We say to it: “You are not a serious enemy. Our enemy is the bourgeoisie. But if you come out together with it, then we are compelled to apply the measures of proletarian dictatorship to you too.”

I shall now pass to the question of internal construction and dwell briefly on the main things that characterise the political experience, the sum total of the political activity of the Central Committee over this period. This political activity of the Central Committee manifested itself in questions of enormous importance every day. Were it not for the intense, concerted work of which I spoke, we could not have acted as we did, could not have solved the military tasks. On the question of the Red Army, which now gives rise to such debate and to which a special item on the agenda of the Congress is devoted, we adopted a mass of separate small decisions that were brought forward by the Central Committee of our Party and carried through the Council of People’s Commissars and the All-Russia Central Executive Committee. Even greater was the number of individual, highly important appointments made by each People’s Commissar on his own, all of which, however, systematically and consistently pursued one common line.

The question of building the Red Army was an entirely new one; it had not even been posed theoretically. Marx once said that the merit of the Paris Communards was that they put into practice decisions not borrowed from some preconceived doctrines, but prescribed by factual necessity. These words of Marx with regard to the Communards had a somewhat sarcastic character, because in the Commune two trends predominated – the Blanquists and the Proudhonists – and both trends were compelled to act contrary to what their doctrine taught them. But we acted in accordance with what Marxism taught us. At the same time, the political activity of the Central Committee in its concrete manifestations was wholly determined by the absolute demands of imperative, pressing need. We had at every step to proceed by groping. This fact will be doubly emphasised by any historian who will be able to unfold, as a whole, the entire activity of the Central Committee of the Party and the activity of the Soviet power during this year. This fact is most striking when we try to embrace with one glance what we have lived through. Yet it did not shake us in the least, even on 10 October 1917, when the question of taking power was being decided. We had no doubt that we would have, in the words of Comrade Trotsky, to experiment, to make a trial. We undertook a job that no one in the world had ever undertaken on such a scale. It was the same with the Red Army. When the army began to disintegrate after the end of the war, many at first thought that this was only a Russian phenomenon. But we see that the Russian revolution was, in essence, a dress rehearsal or one of the rehearsals of the world proletarian revolution. When we discussed the Brest Peace, when at the beginning of January 1918 we posed the question of peace, we did not yet know when and in what other countries this disintegration of the army would begin. We proceeded from experience to experience; we tried to create a volunteer army, groping, feeling our way, testing in what way, under the given circumstances, the task could be solved. And the task stood clearly. Without an armed defence of the socialist republic we could not exist. A ruling class never hands over its power to the oppressed class. But the latter must prove in fact that it is not only capable of overthrowing the exploiters, but also of organising itself for self-defence and of staking its all. We have always said: “There is war and war.” We condemned the imperialist war, but did not deny war in general. Those people became confused who tried to accuse us of militarism. And when I had occasion to read the report of the Berne Conference of yellows, where Kautsky used the expression that the Bolsheviks have not socialism but militarism, I smiled and threw up my hands. As if, indeed, there had ever been a single great revolution in history that was not associated with war. Of course not! We live not only in a state, but in a system of states, and the existence of the Soviet republic side by side with imperialist states for a protracted period is unthinkable. In the end, either one or the other will be victorious. And until that end comes, a series of the most terrible clashes between the Soviet republic and bourgeois states is inevitable. This means that the ruling class, the proletariat, if it wants to rule and will rule, must prove this by its military organisation as well. As a class that until now has played the part of cannon fodder for the commanders from the ruling imperialist class, how is it to create its own commanders, how is it to solve the task of combining the enthusiasm, the new revolutionary creativity of the oppressed with the utilisation of that stock of bourgeois science and technique of militarism in their very worst forms, without which it will not be able to master modern technique and the modern method of warfare?

Here we faced a task that, over the span of a year’s experience, became generalised. When in our Party’s revolutionary programme we wrote on the question of specialists, we were summing up the practical experience of our Party on one of the biggest questions. I do not recall that the earlier teachers of socialism, who foresaw a very great deal in the coming socialist revolution and outlined a very great deal in it – I do not recall that they expressed themselves on this question. For them it did not exist, because it arose only when we took up the building of the Red Army. That meant: to build an army full of enthusiasm out of an oppressed class that had been turned into cannon fodder, and to compel this army to use that which is most violent, most repulsive, of all that we inherited from capitalism.

This contradiction, which confronts us in the question of the Red Army, confronts us in all spheres of our construction. Take the question with which we were occupied most of all: the transition from workers’ control to workers’ administration of industry. After the decrees and decisions of the Council of People’s Commissars and local organs of Soviet power – they all created our political experience in this sphere – the Central Committee had, in essence, only to sum them up. It could hardly guide in the true sense of the word in a question of this kind. It suffices to recall how helpless, spontaneous, and haphazard our first decrees and decisions on workers’ control over industry were. It seemed to us that this was easily done. In practice, this led to the necessity of construction being proved, but we did not answer the question at all of how to construct. Every nationalised factory, every branch of nationalised industry, transport, especially railway transport – the biggest expression of the capitalist mechanism, built in the most centralised manner on the basis of large-scale material technology and the most necessary for the state – all this embodied the concentrated experience of capitalism and caused us immeasurable difficulties.

We have by no means yet crawled out of these difficulties even now. In the beginning, we looked at these difficulties quite abstractly, as revolutionaries who preached but had absolutely no idea how to set about the job. Of course, a mass of people accused us, and to this day all socialists and Social-Democrats accuse us, of having undertaken this job without knowing how to carry it through to the end. But this is a ridiculous accusation on the part of dead people. As if one can carry out the greatest revolution knowing in advance how to do it to the end! As if this knowledge can be drawn from books! No, only from the experience of the masses could our solution be born. And I consider it to our credit that we, with incredible difficulties, undertook to solve a problem that until now was half unknown to us, that we drew the proletarian masses into independent work, that we arrived at the nationalisation of industrial enterprises, and so on. We remember how in Smolny we passed ten or twelve decrees at a stroke. That was a manifestation of our resolve and desire to awaken the experience and independent activity of the proletarian masses. Now we have this experience. Now we have passed, or closely approached, from workers’ control to workers’ administration of industry. Now, instead of absolute helplessness, we have a whole series of practical indications, and, insofar as it was possible, we have summed them up in our programme. This will have to be dealt with in detail in connection with the organisational question. We could not have carried out this work had we not been helped by, and had we not worked with, the comrades in the trade unions.

In Western Europe the question stands differently. There the comrades see the evil in the trade unions, since there these unions have been so taken over by the yellow representatives of the old socialism that the communists see little use in their support. Many representatives of the Western communists, even Rosa Luxemburg, proclaim the liquidation of the trade unions. This shows how much more difficult our task is in Western Europe. With us, on the other hand, we could not have held out for a single month without the support of these unions. In this respect we have an experience of enormous practical work, which allows us to set about solving the most difficult questions.

Take the question of specialists, which confronts us at every step, which is raised at every appointment, which has to be raised by both the representatives of the national economy and the Central Committee of the Party. In the present situation the Central Committee of the Party cannot work in such a way as to observe formalities. Had there been no possibility of singling out comrades who work independently in their own branch, we would have been utterly unable to work. It was only thanks to the fact that we had such organisers as Y. M. Sverdlov that we could, in a war situation, work so that we had not a single conflict deserving of attention. And in this work we were inevitably obliged to make use of the help of those people who offered us their services, invested with the knowledge gained from the old times.

In particular, take the question of administering the military department. Here, without trust in the general staff, in the major organiser-specialists, the question cannot be solved. We had disagreements on this matter in particular, but on the basis there could be no doubt. We resorted to the help of bourgeois specialists, who are thoroughly imbued with bourgeois psychology and who betrayed us and will continue to betray us for years. Nevertheless, if the question is posed in the sense that we should build communism solely with the hands of pure communists, and not with the help of bourgeois specialists, then that is a childish idea. We have steeled ourselves in the struggle, we have strength, unity, and we must proceed by the path of organisational work, making use of the knowledge and experience of these specialists. This is a necessary condition, without which socialism cannot be built. Without the heritage of capitalist culture, we cannot build socialism. There is nothing out of which to build communism except what capitalism has left us.

We now have to build practically, and we have to create communist society with the hands of our enemies. This seems a contradiction, perhaps even an insoluble contradiction, but in fact only by this path can the task of communist construction be solved. And when we look at our experience, at the daily clash with this question, when we see the practical work of the Central Committee, it seems to me that, on the whole, our Party has solved this task. It presented enormous difficulties, but only thus could the task be solved. Organisational creative concerted work must squeeze the bourgeois specialists so that they march in the ranks of the proletariat, however much they may resist and struggle at every step. We must put them to work as a technical and cultural force in order to preserve them and to make a cultured communist country out of an uncultured and savage capitalist country. And I think that during this year we have learned to build, we have got onto the right path and will not stray from this path.

I should also like to touch briefly on the food question and the question of the countryside. The food question has always been the most difficult question for us. In a country where the proletariat had to take power with the help of the peasantry, where the proletariat fell the role of agent of a petty-bourgeois revolution – our revolution, until the organisation of the committees of the poor, i.e., until the summer and even autumn of 1918, was to a considerable degree a bourgeois revolution. We are not afraid to say this. We carried out the October Revolution so easily because the peasantry as a whole came with us, because it went against the landlords, because it saw that here we would go to the end, because we put into effect, in the form of laws, what had been printed in the S.R. newspapers – what the cowardly petty bourgeoisie had promised but could not do. But when the committees of the poor began to be organised – from that moment our revolution became a proletarian revolution. We were confronted with a task that we have by no means solved yet. But it is extremely important that we posed it practically. The committees of the poor were a transitional stage. The first decree on the organisation of committees of the poor by the Soviet power was carried out on the initiative of Comrade Tsyurupa, who was then at the head of the food supply. The non-agricultural population, which was tormented by hunger, had to be saved from ruin. This could be done only through the medium of the committees of the poor, as proletarian organisations. And when we saw that in the countryside, in the summer of 1918, the October Revolution began and took place, only then did we get onto our real proletarian basis, only then did our revolution become proletarian not in proclamations, not in promises and declarations, but in fact.

We have still not solved the task that confronts our Party, the task of creating forms of organisation for the proletariat and semi-proletariat of the countryside. I recently had occasion to be in Petrograd and attend one of the first congresses of agricultural workers of the Petrograd gubernia. I saw how we are still groping our way towards this task, but I think that it will undoubtedly be advanced. I must say that the chief experience that political leadership has given us during this year is that we must here find an organisational support. We took a step towards this by forming committees of the poor, re-electing the Soviets, and reconstructing the food policy, where we encountered incredible difficulties. Perhaps in those borderlands of Russia that are now becoming Soviet – the Ukraine, the Don – this policy will have to be modified. It would be a mistake if we simply copied decrees from a pattern for all parts of Russia, if the Bolshevik-communists, the Soviet workers in the Ukraine and on the Don, were to extend them indiscriminately, wholesale, to other areas. We shall have to live through not a little peculiarities; we by no means bind ourselves to a uniform pattern, we do not decide once and for all that our experience, the experience of central Russia, can be transferred in its entirety to all the borderlands. We have only just approached the task of real construction, we are only taking the first steps in this respect – an immense field of work opens up before us.

I pointed out that the first decisive step of the Soviet power was the formation of committees of the poor. This was carried out by the food-supply workers and brought about by necessity. But in order to carry our tasks through to the end, we need not such temporary organisations as the committees of the poor. Alongside the Soviets we have trade-union organisations, which we use as a schooling for the education of the backward masses. The stratum of workers who have actually administered Russia this year and carried through all policy, who constituted our strength – this stratum in Russia is incredibly thin. We have become convinced of this; we feel it on ourselves. If ever a future historian gathers data on which groups in Russia have been administering these seventeen months, which hundreds, thousands of persons have borne all this work, borne all the incredible burden of governing the country, no one will believe that this could have been achieved with such an insignificant number of forces. The number is insignificant because the intelligent, educated, capable political leaders in Russia were few in number. This stratum in Russia was thin, and during the past struggle it overstrained itself, overworked itself, did more than it was able to. I think that at the present congress we shall seek practical means of how, in industry and – even more important – in the countryside, to use more and more new forces on a mass scale, how to draw into Soviet work workers and peasants standing at the level of the middle peasant or even below that level. Without their help on a mass scale, further activity, in our opinion, is impossible.

Since my time is almost up, I want to say just a few words about our attitude to the middle peasantry. Our attitude towards it was clear to us in principle even before the beginning of the revolution. The task of neutralising the peasantry was set before us. At a meeting in Moscow, where the question of attitude to the petty-bourgeois parties had to be raised, I quoted the exact words of Engels, who not only pointed out that the middle peasantry is our ally, but even expressed the confidence that perhaps it would be possible to manage without reprisals, without measures of suppression, even in relation to the big peasantry. In Russia this supposition has not been justified: we stood, stand, and will stand in direct civil war with the kulaks. This is inevitable. We have seen this in practice. But at every step, owing to the inexperience of Soviet workers and the difficulty of the question, blows that were intended for the kulaks fell on the middle peasantry. Here we have sinned extremely. The experience gathered in this respect will help us to do everything so as to avoid this in the future. Here is a task that confronts us not theoretically but practically. You know perfectly well that this task is difficult. We have no goods that we could give the middle peasant, and he is a materialist, a practical person, and demands concrete material goods that we cannot give now and without which the country must manage for perhaps still months of hard struggle, which now promises complete victory. But we can do a great deal in our administrative practice: improve our apparatus, correct a mass of abuses. We can, and must, straighten and correct the line of our Party, which has not gone sufficiently far towards a bloc, an alliance, an agreement with the middle peasantry.

Here, in brief outline, is what I have been able to note for you now concerning the economic and political work of the Central Committee during the past year. I must now pass in the briefest manner to the second part of the task entrusted to me by the Central Committee – the organisational report of the Central Committee. This task could only be carried out properly by Yakov Mikhailovich Sverdlov, who was appointed the Central Committee’s rapporteur on this question. Possessing an enormous, incredible memory, he kept in it the greater part of his report, and his personal acquaintance with the organisational work in the localities enabled him to make this report. I am not able to replace him to the hundredth part, because in this work we were compelled to rely entirely, and had every foundation to rely, on Comrade Sverdlov, who at every turn took decisions single-handedly.

I can give here small fragments from what is ready from the written reports. But the Secretariat of the Central Committee, which was not able to finish its work, most definitely promised that in the coming week the written reports would be ready for printing, duplicated on a mimeograph, and placed at the disposal of all members of the congress. They will supplement the cursory fragmentary indications that I can give here. In the material of the report that is now available in written form, we first of all find data on incoming papers: for December 1918 – 1,483, for January 1919 – 1,537, and for February – 1,840.