V. I. Lenin

During Party Week in Moscow, 13,600 people were enrolled in the Party.

This is a huge, quite unexpected success. The entire bourgeoisie, and especially the urban petty bourgeoisie, including
the specialists, officials and office workers who lament the loss
of their privileged ‘ruling’ position—all these gentlemen have recently, particularly during Party Week in Moscow,
been doing their best to sow panic and to prophesy the imminent
collapse of Soviet power and the imminent victory of Denikin.

And with what consummate artistry this “intellectualist” public wields the weapon of sowing
panic! And it has indeed become a real weapon in the class
struggle of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat. In periods
such as the one we are passing through, the petty bourgeoisie
merges in “one reactionary mass” with the bourgeoisie and “passionately” seizes on this weapon.

It is Moscow, where the trading element was especially strong,
where there was a greater concentration of exploiters, landowners,
capitalists and rentiers than anywhere else, where capitalist
development brought together a mass of bourgeois intellectuals,
where the central state administration produced an especially
large body of officials-it is Moscow that has furnished an
exceptionally convenient field for bourgeois tittle-tattle,
bourgeois malicious talk and bourgeois panic-sowing. The
successful offensive of Denikin and Yudenich was a “factor” that favoured to an extraordinary extent the
“successes” of this bourgeois weapon.

And yet, when the mass of the proletarians saw Denikin’s
“successes” and realised all the difficulties, burdens and dangers attaching to the title and duties of a Communist at
the present time, thousands and thousands of them rose up to
reinforce the Party of Communists, to undertake the incredibly
heavy burden of state administration.

The success of Soviet power, the success of our Party, is truly
remarkable!

This success has proved and vividly demonstrated to the people
of the capital, and then to the whole Republic and the whole
world, that it is in the proletarian milieu, among the genuine
representatives of the working people, that the most reliable
source of the strength and durability of Soviet power is to be
found. This successful voluntary enrolment in the Party at a time
of maximum difficulty and danger is a real demonstration of that aspect of the dictatorship of the proletariat which its
enemies, in their malice, refuse to see but which is valued above
all by the real friends of the emancipation of labour from the
capitalist yoke, namely, the special strength of the moral (in the best sense of the word) influence of the
proletariat (which wields state power) on the masses, the
ways this influence is exerted.

With state power in their hands, the foremost sections of the
proletariat have by their example shown the mass of the working
people, shown them throughout two whole years (an immense period
for our exceptionally rapid tempo of political development), a
model of such devotion to the interests of the working people, such vigour in the struggle against the enemies of the
working people (against the exploiters in general and against
“property-owners” and profiteers in particular), such firmness in difficult moments, such self-sacrificing resistance to
the bandits of world imperialism, that the strength of the
workers’ and peasants’ sympathy for their vanguard has proved by itself capable of performing
miracles.

It is indeed a miracle. Workers, who have suffered unprecedented torments of hunger, cold, economic ruin and
devastation, are not only maintaining their cheerful spirit, their
entire devotion to Soviet power, all the energy of self-sacrifice
and heroism, but also, despite their lack of training and
experience, are undertaking the burden of steering the ship of
state! And this at a moment when the storm has reached the peak of
its fury ....

The history of our proletarian revolution is full of such
miracles. They will lead, surely and inevitably, no matter what
severe trials may be in store, to the full victory of the world
Soviet republic.

We must take care now that proper use is made of the new Party members, Particularly great attention must be devoted to
this task, for it is not an easy one; it is a new task and cannot
be accomplished by old routines.

Capitalism stifled, suppressed and killed a wealth of talent
among the workers and working peasants. These talents perished
under the oppression of want, poverty and the outrage of human
dignity. It is our duty now to bring out these talents and put
them to work. The new members who have joined the Party during
Party Week are undoubtedly for the most part inexperienced arid
ignorant in matters of state administration. Equally undoubtedly
these are most devoted, most sincere and capable people from the
sections of society that capitalism artificially held down, reduced to the lowest level and did not allow to
rise. Among them, however, there is more strength, vigour, staunchness, directness and sincerity than among other
sections.

It follows that all Party organisations must give especial
thought to the employment of these new Party members. They must be
more boldly given the most varied kinds of state work, they must be tested in practice as rapidly as possible.

Boldness, of course, must not be taken to mean that the new
members are to be entrusted at once with responsible posts requiring knowledge they do not possess. We must be bold in
combating red tape: not for nothing has our Party Programme very
definitely raised the question of the causes of a certain revival
of bureaucratic methods and indicated methods of combating it. We
must be bold in establishing, first of all, supervision
over office workers, officials and specialists by new Party
members who are well acquainted with the condition of the people,
their needs and requirements. We must be bold in immediately affording these new members opportunities for
developing and displaying their abilities in work on a broad scale. We must be bold in breaking with customary routine
(among us too-quite often, alasi-there is an excessive fear of
encroaching on established Soviet routine, although sometimes the
“establishing” has been done not by class-conscious
Communists, but by old officials and office workers); we must be
bold in the sense that we must be prepared with revolutionary
speed to alter the form of work for new Party members so as to
test them more quickly and to find the appropriate place for
them.

In many cases new Party members can be given posts where, in
the course of checking up the conscientiousness with which old
officials perform their tasks, these Party members will quickly
learn the job themselves and he able to take it over independently. In other cases they can be placed so as to renovate
and refresh the intermediary links between the mass of workers and
peasants on the one hand, and the state apparatus on the other. In
our industrial “chief administrations and central boards”, in our agricultural “state farms” there
are still many, far too many, saboteurs, landowners and
capitalists in hiding, who harm Soviet power in every way. Experienced Party workers in the centre and the localities
should show their efficiency through their ability to make
intensive use of the new Party forces for a determined fight
against this evil.

The Soviet Republic must become a single armed camp where,
there is a maximum of effort, a maximum economy of forces, a
maximum reduction of all red tape and unnecessary formalism and a
maximum simplification of the apparatus which must be not only as
close as possible to the needs of the masses, but also something
they can readily understand and participate in independently.

Increased mobilisation of old Party members for army work is
taking place. This activity must not be weakened in any way, but
more and more intensified. At the same time, however and with the
aim of achieving success in the war, we must improve, simplify and
revitalise our civil administration.

Victory in war goes to the side whose people has greater
reserves, greater sources of strength and greater endurance.

We have more of all these qualities than the Whites, more than
the “all-powerful” Anglo-French imperialism, this colossus with feet of clay. We have more of them because we can
draw, and for a long time will continue to draw, more and more
deeply upon the workers and working peasants, upon those classes
which were oppressed by capitalism and which everywhere form the
overwhelming majority of the population. We can draw from this
most capacious reservoir, for it gives us leaders of the workers
and peasants in the building of socialism who are the most
sincere, the most steeled by the burdens of life, the closest to
the workers and peasants.

Our enemies, whether the Russian or the world bourgeoisie, have
nothing remotely resembling this reservoir; the ground is more and
more giving way under their feet; they are being deserted by ever
greater number of their former supporters among the workers and
peasants.

That is why, in the last analysis, the victory of Soviet power
throughout the world is certain and inevitable.

October 21, 1919