Printed as a separate pamphlet in 1919, published by the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Red Army Deputies; the afterword first printed in 1922 in the Collected Works of N. Lenin (V. Ulyanov), Vol. XVI

Printed from the text of the pamphlet; the afterword from the manuscript

Now, just when we have succeeded in restoring the revolutionary International, the Communist International, just when the Soviet form of movement has itself spontaneously become the programme, both theoretical and practical, for the entire Third International, when this has been accomplished—it is precisely now that it is opportune to recall the general development of the Soviets. What are Soviets? What is the significance of this form, created by the masses and not invented by anyone?

Only from this point of view, it seems to me, can we correctly assess both the tasks that have already been set before us—the power conquered by the proletariat—and the fulfilment of these tasks, which we, having already had the dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia, have attempted and are attempting to carry out over the past year.

Only from the point of view of the general role of the Soviets, their general significance, their place in world-historical development, can we understand the situation in which we found ourselves, why we had to act in one way and not another, and by what we must verify, looking back, the correctness or incorrectness of our steps.

And such more general, broader, or more far-reaching views are doubly necessary for us now, because party people in Russia sometimes have to suffer and notice shortcomings, defects, and dissatisfaction with their work because the practical implementation of the urgent, current, immediate, topical tasks of administration, which have fallen and continue to fall on the Soviet government, often distracts and clogs our attention, compels us, despite all our efforts—there is nothing to be done here against the conditions of activity—to devote too much attention to the petty details of administration and to forget the general course of development of the entire proletarian dictatorship on a world scale, its development through the power of the Soviets, or rather, through the Soviet movement, through the groping of the proletarian masses within the Soviets—what we have all experienced and forgotten—and through the attempt to exercise dictatorship within the Soviets.

Such are the difficulties that have fallen upon us, and such are the general tasks, in my opinion, to which we must try to direct attention, so as to tear ourselves away, as far as possible, from the administrative trifles that weigh on every person engaged in practical Soviet work, and to understand what a great step remains for us to take—for us, as a detachment of the world proletarian army.

It is impossible to achieve complete, final victory on a world scale in Russia alone; it can be achieved only when the proletariat wins in all, or at least in several, of the major advanced countries. Only then can we say with full confidence that the cause of the proletariat has triumphed, that our first aim—the overthrow of capitalism—has been attained.

We accomplished this in relation to one country, and this set before us a second task. If Soviet power has been established, if the bourgeoisie has been overthrown in one country, the second task is to wage struggle on an international scale, struggle on a different plane, the struggle of a proletarian state surrounded by capitalist states.

This is an extraordinarily new and difficult situation.

On the other hand, if bourgeois power has been overthrown, the main task becomes the organisation of construction.

The yellow socialists, who have now assembled in Berne and are preparing to favour us with a visit from distinguished foreigners, are most fond of hurling phrases such as: “The Bolsheviks believe in the omnipotence of violence.” This phrase only shows that those who utter it, in the heat of revolutionary struggle, when they are utterly crushed by the violence of the bourgeoisie—see what is happening in Germany—are incapable of teaching their proletariat the tactics of necessary violence.

There are conditions under which violence is both necessary and useful, and there are conditions under which violence can yield no results at all. However, there have been instances when this distinction was not grasped by everyone, and this must be discussed. In October, violence, the overthrow of the bourgeoisie by Soviet power, the removal of the old government, revolutionary violence, yielded brilliant success.

Why? Because, firstly, the masses were organised in Soviets, and because, secondly, the adversary—the bourgeoisie—had been undermined, sapped, eroded by the long political period from February to October, just as a block of ice is eroded by spring waters, and had already become completely weakened internally. And the movement in October, if compared even with the present revolutionary movement in Germany, so easily gave us a complete, brilliant victory of revolutionary violence.

Is it possible to assume that such a path, such a form of struggle, such an easy victory of revolutionary violence, is feasible without these conditions?

To make such an assumption would be the greatest mistake. And the greater the revolutionary victories won under certain conditions, the more often does the danger arise that we allow ourselves to be seduced by these victories, without thinking coolly, calmly, and attentively about the conditions under which this was possible.

When we had worn down the Kerensky government and the coalition ministry of Milyukov, one might say, threadbare, tried them out in every combination of ministerial posts, made them perform a ministerial leapfrog from right to left and left to right, from bottom to top and top to bottom, it turned out that, however they seated themselves, they were unfit to be musicians, and then they flew off like fluff.

Does the situation that now confronts us as a practical task in relation to world imperialism resemble that? Of course not.

That is why, in the sphere of foreign policy, the question of the Brest Peace caused such difficulties. The mass character of the movement helped to overcome them.

But what is the source of the mistakes that made some comrades think we were committing an unheard-of crime? Even now there are isolated eccentrics among people who can wield a pen and who imagine that they personally represent something, have experience, can teach, etc., and who still assert today that this was a compromise with German imperialism.

Yes, such a compromise existed when we “compromised” with the tsar by going into the abominable reactionary Duma and blowing it up from within.

Could one have counted on overthrowing world imperialism by the mere application of violence, without a corresponding development of the proletariat in those imperialist countries?

If the task is posed in this way—and we, as Marxists, have always taught that it must be posed in this and only this way—then applying a policy of violence here would be sheer absurdity and nonsense and a complete failure to understand the conditions under which a policy of violence can succeed.

Now we see this. We have been enriched by experience.

While we had to gather strength during the period of the Brest Peace and, with the most agonising difficulties, lay the foundation of a new army, the Red Army, in a country ruined and exhausted by war as no other country in the world, while we were laying this foundation stone by stone in the first half and at the beginning of the second half of 1918, the imperialism of other countries was being undermined by internal disintegration, by the growth of protest, and was becoming weakened.

And revolutionary violence triumphed in Germany when months of developing struggle had sapped imperialism in that country, and the same thing is now being repeated, to a certain degree—to a certain degree, not fully—in relation to the Entente countries.

An American, who observed what was happening in the Western European countries very attentively, directly, and in no way prejudicially, told me recently: “France undoubtedly faces the greatest disappointment, a collapse of illusions; the French are being fed promises—‘you have won,’ they say.” The old patriotic feelings of the entire French nation, the bitterness at how they were crushed in 1870, the furious indignation at how the country has been depopulated, bled white, and exhausted by four years of war—all this the bourgeoisie uses to channel into chauvinism: “We have defeated the Germans; we shall have full pockets and we shall rest.” But the sober American, looking at things from a mercantile point of view, says: “The German will not pay, because he has nothing to pay with.”

That is why the French people are being fed promises and fairy tales that peace and final victory are just around the corner. But peace means the collapse of all hopes of crawling out of this bloody swamp even half alive, with broken arms and legs, but alive. It is impossible to crawl out of this peace under the old capitalism, because such an avalanche of capitalist debts has accumulated, such a heap of ruin has been caused throughout the capitalist world by the war, that it is impossible to crawl out without overthrowing the avalanche itself.

Even those who are not revolutionaries and do not believe in revolution and fear it, nevertheless theoretically discuss it and will be compelled by the course of events and the consequences of the imperialist war to realise that there is no other way out than revolution.

I repeat, I was particularly struck by the assessment of the situation made by an American from the point of view of a businessman who, of course, does not occupy himself with the theory of the class struggle and sincerely considers it nonsense, but who is interested in millions and billions and, knowing how to count, asks: Will they pay or not?—and answers, again from the point of view of a purely commercial calculation: “There is nothing to pay with! You won’t even get 20 kopecks to the ruble!”

This is the situation in which we see, in all the Entente countries, a vast and widespread ferment based on the workers’ sympathy for the Soviet form.

For example, in Paris, the crowd—perhaps the most sensitive of all popular assemblies in other countries, because in Paris it has gone through a great school, has carried out a series of revolutions—the crowd there, the most responsive, which will not allow a speaker to strike a false note, now cuts short those who dare to speak against Bolshevism; while only a few months ago, one could not even hint at Bolshevism before a Paris crowd without meeting derisive responses from that very crowd.

Meanwhile, in Paris, the bourgeoisie is bringing into play its entire system of lies, slander, and deceit against Bolshevism. But we already know what it means when, in 1917, we Bolsheviks experienced the persecution of the entire bourgeois press. In our country, the bourgeois gentlemen slightly miscalculated and overdid it, thinking they were ensnaring the Bolsheviks in nets of lies and slander; indeed, they so overdid it, over-salted their attacks, that they gave us free advertising and compelled the most backward workers to think: “If the capitalists abuse the Bolsheviks so much, it means these Bolsheviks know how to fight the capitalists!”

That is why the policy we had to pursue during the Brest Peace, the most brutal, violent, and humiliating peace, proved to be the only correct policy.

And I think it is not useless to recall this policy once again now, when the situation is becoming similar with regard to the Entente countries, when they are all still full of a frenzied desire to shift their debts, poverty, and ruin onto Russia, to plunder and crush Russia, in order to divert from themselves the growing indignation of their own working masses.

Looking at things soberly, we are forced to tell ourselves quite clearly—if we do not wish to befuddle our own and other people’s heads, which is a harmful occupation for a revolutionary—we must say that the Entente is stronger than we are from the military standpoint. But if we consider the matter in its development, we shall also say with the fullest clarity and conviction, based not only on our revolutionary views but also on experience, that this might of the Entente countries is not for long; they are on the eve of a tremendous shift in the mood of their masses.

They have fed both the French and English workers promises: “We shall plunder the whole world, and then you will be sated.” That is what the entire bourgeois press shouts, drumming all this into the heads of the undeveloped masses.

In a few months, let us suppose, they will conclude peace, unless they fall out with one another right there and then, of which there are a whole number of very serious signs. But if they succeed in concluding peace without tearing each other’s hair and throats out, this peace will be the beginning of immediate collapse, because they are in no position to pay these unheard-of debts and to remedy the desperate ruin, when wheat production in France has fallen by more than half, hunger is knocking everywhere, and the productive forces are destroyed.

If one looks at things soberly, one must admit that the method of assessing things that gave us such a correct measure in assessing the Russian revolution is also daily confirming the approach of world revolution. We know that the streams that will sweep away these ice-floes of the Entente—the ice-floes of the Accord, of capitalism, of imperialism—are growing stronger every day.

On the one hand, the Entente countries are stronger than we; on the other hand, they cannot possibly hold out for any considerable length of time given their internal situation.

From this situation arise the complex tasks of international policy—tasks that we may, and even probably will, have to solve in the coming days, and about which I am not sufficiently informed in all concreteness, but about which I most of all wish to speak—precisely so that the experience in the sphere of activity of the Council of People’s Commissars, in the sphere of foreign policy, should stand before you, comrades, in a clear and compelling form.

Our most essential experience is the Brest Peace. That is the most essential thing in the sum total of the foreign policy of the Council of People’s Commissars. We had to bide our time, retreat, manoeuvre, sign the most humiliating peace, thereby gaining the possibility of building a new foundation for a new, socialist army. And we have laid the foundation, while our once mighty and omnipotent adversary has already proved powerless.

This is what matters are coming to throughout the world, and this is the main and fundamental lesson that must be grasped as firmly as possible and understood as clearly as possible, so as not to make mistakes in the very complex, very difficult, very tangled questions of foreign policy that, any day now, will confront the Council of People’s Commissars, the Central Executive Committee, and indeed the entire Soviet government.

With this, I shall conclude the question of foreign policy in order to pass to some of the other most important questions.

Comrades, as regards military activity, in February and March 1918—a year ago—we had no army at all. We had perhaps ten million armed workers and peasants who made up the old army, which had completely disintegrated and was imbued with an absolute readiness and determination to leave, run away, and abandon everything at all costs.

This phenomenon was then regarded as exclusively Russian. It was thought that the Russians, with their characteristic impatience or insufficient organisation, could not endure it, whereas the Germans would endure it.

Thus we were told. And we now see that, after a few months, the organisation of the German army, which was immeasurably superior to ours in culture, technique, discipline, in human conditions for the sick, the wounded, in leave arrangements, etc., suffered the same story. The most cultured and disciplined masses could not endure the butchery, the years of butchery; a period of absolute disintegration set in, and even the advanced German army gave way.

Obviously, there is a limit not only for Russia, but for all countries. It is a different limit for different countries, but it is a limit beyond which it is impossible to wage war in the interests of the capitalists. That is what we are now observing.

German imperialism has exposed itself completely as a predator. Most importantly, in America and in France, in these so-called democracies (the traitors to socialism, the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, those wretched people who call themselves socialists, babble about democracies), in these foremost democracies of the world, in these republics, imperialism is growing more insolent every day, and wild beasts, predators, are showing themselves as nowhere else. They are plundering the world, fighting among themselves, and arming against each other. This cannot be concealed for long. It could be concealed while there was the intoxication of war. The intoxication is passing, peace is approaching, and the masses precisely in these democracies see, despite all the lies, that the war has led to new plunder. The most democratic republic is nothing but a garb for the predator, the most brutal, the most cynical, ready to ruin hundreds of millions of people in order to pay the debts, i.e., to pay the gentlemen imperialists and capitalists for graciously allowing the workers to cut each other’s throats. This is becoming clearer to the masses with every day.

This is the situation in which such political pronouncements become possible as an article by a military observer in the newspaper of the richest and most politically experienced bourgeoisie—the English Times—assessing events in such terms: “Throughout the world armies are disintegrating, but there is only one country where an army is being built, and that country is Russia.”

This is a fact that the bourgeoisie, which is far stronger militarily than Soviet Bolshevism, is forced to acknowledge. And with this fact we approach an assessment of what we have accomplished in this year of Soviet work.

We have succeeded in achieving a turning point when, in place of a ten-million army that had wholly fled, unable to endure the horrors of war and having understood that this war was criminal, a socialist army has begun to be built, hundreds of thousands upon hundreds of thousands, knowing what it is fighting for and making sacrifices and suffering hardships greater than under tsarism, because it knows that it is defending its own cause, its own land, its own power in the factory, defending the power of the working people, while the working people in other countries, though with difficulty and hardship, are awakening.

Such is the situation that characterises the year’s experience of Soviet power.

The war is incredibly difficult for Soviet Russia, the war is incredibly difficult for a people who for four years endured the horrors of the imperialist war. The war is incredibly hard for Soviet Russia. But at the present time, even powerful enemies acknowledge that their army is disintegrating, while ours is being built. Because, for the first time in history, an army is being built on closeness, on indissoluble closeness, one might say on indissoluble fusion, between the Soviets and the army. The Soviets unite all the working and exploited people—and the army is being built on the principles of socialist defence and consciousness.

A Prussian monarch in the eighteenth century uttered a clever phrase: “If our soldiers understood what we were fighting for, it would be impossible to wage a single war.” The old Prussian monarch was no fool. But we are now prepared to say, comparing our situation with that of that monarch: we can wage war because the masses know what they are fighting for, and they want to fight, despite unheard-of hardships—I repeat, the hardships of war are now greater than under tsarism—they know that they are making desperate, unbearably heavy sacrifices in defending their socialist cause, fighting alongside those workers in other countries who are “disintegrating” and have begun to understand our situation.

There are foolish people who cry about red militarism; these are political swindlers who pretend to believe in this foolishness and hurl such accusations right and left, using their lawyer’s skill to concoct false arguments and to throw sand in the eyes of the masses. And the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries shout: “Look, instead of socialism, they are giving you red militarism!”

Indeed, what a “terrible” crime! The imperialists of the whole world have hurled themselves upon the Russian Republic in order to strangle it, and we began to create an army which, for the first time in history, knows what it is fighting for and what it is making sacrifices for, and with success is resisting a more numerous enemy, bringing nearer, with each month of resistance, world revolution on a scale hitherto unseen—and this is condemned as red militarism!

I repeat—these are either fools who defy any political assessment, or political swindlers.

Everyone knows that this war was forced upon us; at the beginning of 1918 we ended the old war and did not start a new one; everyone knows that the White Guards came against us in the west, south, and east only thanks to the aid of the Entente, which flung millions right and left, and the vast stocks of equipment and military matériel left over from the imperialist war were gathered up by the advanced countries and thrown to the aid of the White Guards, for these gentlemen millionaires and billionaires know that their fate is being decided here, that here they will perish if they do not crush us immediately.

The socialist republic is making unheard-of efforts, bearing sacrifices, and winning victories; and if we now, after a year of civil war, look at the map—what was Soviet Russia in March 1918, and what had it become by July 1918, when the German imperialists stood on the west along the line of the Brest Peace, Ukraine was under the yoke of the German imperialists, in the east as far as Kazan and Simbirsk the Czechoslovaks, bought by the French and English, held sway—and if we now look at the map, we see that we have expanded enormously, we have won tremendous victories.

That is the situation in which only the most filthy and base political swindlers can utter strong words accusing us of red militarism.

There has never been in history a revolution which, having conquered, could be put in one’s pocket and rest on one’s laurels. Whoever thinks that such revolutions are conceivable is not only no revolutionary, but the most vicious enemy of the working class. There has never been a single such revolution, not even a secondary one, not even a bourgeois one, when it was only a question of transferring power from one propertied minority to another minority. We know examples! The French Revolution, against which the old powers rose up at the beginning of the nineteenth century to crush it, is called great precisely because it succeeded in rousing the broad popular masses to defend its gains, masses who repulsed the whole world; herein lies one of its great merits.

A revolution is subjected to the most serious tests in deed, in struggle, in fire. If you are oppressed, exploited, and are thinking of throwing off the power of the exploiters, if you have resolved to carry the overthrow to its end, then you must know that you will have to withstand the onslaught of the exploiters of the whole world; and if you are ready to repulse that onslaught and to make new sacrifices in order to stand firm in the struggle, then you are a revolutionary; otherwise you will be crushed.

That is how the question has been posed by the history of all revolutions.

The real test of our revolution is that we, in a backward country, succeeded, before others, in taking power, in winning the Soviet form of government, the power of the working and exploited people. Shall we succeed in holding it, at least until the masses of other countries bestir themselves? And if we do not succeed in making new sacrifices and holding on, then they will say: the revolution turned out to be historically unjustified. The democrats of civilised countries, armed to the teeth, are however afraid of the appearance, in some hundred-million-strong free republic like America, of a mere hundred Bolsheviks; this is such an infection! And the struggle with a hundred emigrants from starving, ruined Russia who will talk about Bolshevism proves too much for the democrats! The sympathies of the masses are on our side! For the bourgeoisie there is only one salvation: while the sword has not fallen from their hands, while the guns are in their hands, to turn these guns on Soviet Russia and crush it in a few months, because afterwards nothing will crush it. Such is the situation we are in, such is what determines the military policy of the Council of People’s Commissars for this year, and such is why we, pointing to the facts, to the results, have the right to say that we are standing the test only because the workers and peasants, unbelievably exhausted by the war, are creating a new army under even more excruciating conditions, displaying new heroism.

These are brief summaries of the policy of the Soviet government in the military sphere. Here I shall permit myself to say a few more words on one point where policy in the military question merges with policy in other questions, with economic policy—I speak of the military specialists.

You probably know what disputes this question has aroused, how often comrades, belonging to the most devoted and convinced Bolshevik-Communists, have expressed fervent protests against our using old military specialists, tsarist generals and officers, who had stained themselves with service to tsarism and sometimes with bloody reprisals against workers and peasants, in the construction of the Red socialist army.

The contradiction is glaring, indignation here is, one might say, spontaneous. How can one build a socialist army with the aid of specialists of tsarism?!

It turned out that we built it only in that way. And if we reflect on the task that fell to our lot here, it is not difficult to understand that it could be built only in this way. This is not a military matter alone; this task confronted us in all spheres of the life of the people and the national economy.

The old utopian socialists imagined that socialism could be built with other people, that they would first bring up good, pure, splendidly trained people and then build socialism out of them. We always laughed and said that this was a puppet play, that this was an amusement for young ladies of the socialism of muslin, but not serious politics.

We want to build socialism out of people who have been brought up by capitalism, spoiled and corrupted by it, but also steeled by it for struggle. There are proletarians who are so steeled that they are capable of making sacrifices a thousand times greater than any army; there are tens of millions of downtrodden peasants, ignorant, scattered, but capable, if the proletariat pursues skilful tactics, of uniting around it in the struggle. And then there are specialists in science and technology, all thoroughly imbued with a bourgeois world outlook, there are military specialists who have been brought up in bourgeois conditions—and it is good if they were in bourgeois, otherwise in landlord, in flogging, in serf-owning conditions. As for the national economy, all the agronomists, engineers, teachers—they were all taken from the propertied class; they did not drop from the sky! A propertyless proletarian from the bench and a peasant from the plough could not go to university either under Tsar Nicholas or under the republican President Wilson. Science and technology are for the rich, for the propertied; capitalism gives culture only to a minority. And we must build socialism out of this culture. We have no other material. We want to build socialism immediately out of the material that capitalism left us from yesterday to today, right now, and not out of people who will be prepared in hothouses, if we amuse ourselves with this fairy tale. We have bourgeois specialists, and nothing else. We have no other bricks; we have nothing to build with. Socialism must win, and we, socialists and communists, must prove in practice that we are capable of building socialism out of these bricks, out of this material, of building a socialist society out of proletarians, who have enjoyed culture in a negligible quantity, and out of bourgeois specialists.

And if you do not build communist society out of this material, then you are empty phrase-mongers, windbags.

That is how the question is posed by the historical legacy of world capitalism! That is the difficulty that confronted us concretely when we took power, when we received the Soviet apparatus!

This is one half of the task, and the greater half of the task. The Soviet apparatus means that the working people are united so as to crush capitalism with the weight of their mass unity. And they did crush it. But crushed capitalism will not fill your belly. One must take all the culture that capitalism left and build socialism out of it. One must take all science, technology, all knowledge, art. Without this we cannot build the life of communist society. And this science, technology, art are in the hands of the specialists and in their heads.

Thus is the task posed in all spheres—a contradictory task, as contradictory as the whole of capitalism, most difficult, but feasible. Not because we shall bring up pure communist specialists in about twenty years: the first generation of communists without stain or reproach; no, excuse me, we must arrange everything now, not in twenty years, but in two months, in order to fight against the bourgeoisie, against bourgeois science and technology of the whole world. Here we must win. To compel the bourgeois specialists to serve us by the weight of our mass—that is difficult, but possible; and if we do this, we shall win.

When recently Comrade Trotsky informed me that we had several tens of thousands of officers in the military department, I then obtained a concrete conception of the secret of utilising our enemy: how to compel those who were its opponents to build communism, to build communism out of the bricks that the capitalists had picked up against us! We are given no other bricks! And so, out of these bricks, under the leadership of the proletariat, we must compel the bourgeois specialists to build our edifice. That is what is difficult, and that is the pledge of victory!

Of course, on this path, as a new and difficult one, not a few mistakes have been made, many defeats awaited us along this path; everyone knows that a certain number of the specialists have systematically betrayed us: among specialists in factories, in agronomy, in administration, we at every step have come up and still come up against a malicious attitude to work, malicious sabotage.

We know that all these are tremendous difficulties and that they cannot be overcome by violence alone. We are, of course, not against violence; we laugh at those who have a negative attitude toward the dictatorship of the proletariat and we say that they are foolish people, unable to understand that there must be either a dictatorship of the proletariat or a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Anyone who says otherwise is either an idiot or so politically illiterate that it would be a shame to let him not only onto a platform but even into a meeting. There can be either violence against Liebknecht and Luxemburg, the beating to death of the best leaders of the workers, or the forcible suppression of the exploiters; and whoever dreams of a middle course is our most harmful and dangerous adversary. That is how the question stands now. So that when we speak of utilising specialists, we must bear in mind the lesson of Soviet policy over the year; in this year we broke and defeated the exploiters, and now we must solve the task of utilising bourgeois specialists. Here, I repeat, nothing can be done by violence alone. Here, in addition to violence, after victorious violence, what is needed is organisation, discipline, and the moral weight of the victorious proletariat, which subordinates to itself and draws into its work all the bourgeois specialists!

It will be said: instead of violence, Lenin recommends moral influence! But it is foolish to imagine that by violence alone the question of organising new science and technology in the work of building communist society can be solved. Nonsense! We, as a party, as people who have learned something during this year of Soviet work, shall not fall into this foolishness and shall warn the masses against it. To utilise the entire apparatus of bourgeois, capitalist society—such a task requires not only victorious violence, it requires, beyond that, organisation, discipline, comradely discipline among the masses, the organisation of proletarian influence on the rest of the population, the creation of a new mass setting in which the bourgeois specialist sees that he has no way out, that there is no returning to the old society, and that he can do his work only together with the communists, who stand beside him, guide the masses, enjoy the absolute trust of the masses, and are moving toward the goal that the fruits of bourgeois science and technology, the fruits of millennia of civilisation, should not go to a handful of people who use them to stand out and grow rich, but should go to all the working people without exception.

The task is one of enormous difficulty, requiring decades to be fully solved! And to solve it, it is necessary to create such a force, such discipline, comradely discipline, Soviet discipline, proletarian discipline, as will not only physically crush the bourgeois counter-revolutionaries but will also encompass them completely, subordinate them, compel them to move along our rails, to serve our cause.

I repeat that in the work of military construction and economic construction, and in the work of every council of national economy, and in the work of every factory committee, every nationalised factory, we daily came up against this task. Hardly a single week passed during this year when, in one way or another, in one form or another, such a question was not raised and solved by us in the Council of People’s Commissars. And I am sure that there has not been a single factory committee in Russia, a single agricultural commune, a single Soviet farm, a single uyezd land department, that has not come up against this question dozens of times during the year of Soviet work.

This is the difficulty of the task, but this is also the genuinely gratifying task, this is what we must do now, on the day after the force of the proletarian uprising has crushed the exploiters. We crushed their resistance—that had to be done—but not only this had to be done; by the force of the new organisation, the comradely organisation of the working people, we must compel them to serve us, must cure them of their old vices, prevent them from returning to their exploiter practices. They have remained old bourgeois and sit, in our army, in officers’ posts and headquarters; they, engineers and agronomists, these old bourgeois who call themselves Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries. The label changes nothing, but they are bourgeois through and through, from head to toe, in their outlook and habits.

What then, shall we throw them out? You cannot throw out hundreds of thousands! And if we did throw them out, we would only cripple ourselves. We have nothing with which to build communism except what capitalism created. We must not throw them out, but break their resistance, watching them at every step, making no political concessions, to which characterless people succumb every minute. Cultured people succumb to the policies and influence of the bourgeoisie because they received all their culture from the bourgeois milieu and through it. That is why they stumble at every step and make political concessions to the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie.

A communist who says that he must not get into a position where his hands become dirty, that he must have clean communist hands, that he will build communist society with clean communist hands, not utilising the despicable counter-revolutionary bourgeois cooperators—is an empty phrase-monger, because, on the contrary, one cannot but utilise them.

The practical task now stands as follows: turn those who have been brought up by capitalism against us to our service, watch over them every day, place workers’ commissars over them in the setting of communist organisation, every day suppress counter-revolutionary encroachments, and at the same time learn from them.

At best, we have the science of the agitator, the propagandist, of a person steeled by the devilishly hard fate of a factory worker or a starving peasant—a science that teaches how to hold out for a long time, to display persistence in struggle, which has saved us up to now; all this is necessary; but this is not enough, with this alone one cannot win; for the victory to be complete and final, one must also take everything of value that exists in capitalism, take all science and culture for oneself.

Where is this to be taken from? It must be learned from them, from our enemies, by our advanced peasants, by class-conscious workers in their factories, in the uyezd land department from a