## The Fundamental Condition of Victory

How are we to consolidate victory over Kolchak? How are we to bring it to completion, destroying Denikin? How are we to make impossible any further attempts by the landlords, capitalists, and kulaks to restore their power, land, capital, and domination over workers and peasants?

This question is equivalent to the question of the fate of the entire socialist revolution in Russia. Every conscious worker and peasant ponders this question. And it is not difficult to convince oneself that the food question now lies at the foundation of all socialist construction.

To gather all surplus grain into the hands of the central Soviet power, to distribute it correctly — this means making our Red Army invincible, this means finally crushing Kolchak and Denikin, this means restoring industry and ensuring proper socialist production and distribution, ensuring complete socialist order.

We already have sufficient experience in food work and socialist construction to clearly envision both the scale of this task and the means of solving it. We know all the difficulty of the task, but we also know from experience that we have found the correct path for its solution and that, by concentrating more on this task, by intensifying energy, straining all our forces, and perfecting the apparatus, we can solve the task completely.

From August 1, 1917 to August 1, 1918, the state procured 30 million poods of grain. From August 1, 1918 to August 1, 1919, approximately 105 million — that is, three and a half times more — even though during this period we had no access whatsoever to the Don region, the North Caucasus, and Western Siberia, almost no access to Ukraine, that is, the very richest grain-producing areas.

With a good harvest in 1919, we can procure very much — perhaps 400 million poods of grain and more. Then we shall extraordinarily increase the extraction of fuel, timber, coal, and so forth. Then we shall restore industry and firmly, finally emerge onto the broad road of planned socialist construction. Then we shall completely defeat speculation, we shall destroy this repugnant legacy of capitalism, which now, everywhere and in every way, corrupts the sprouts of socialism.

## The Correct Path to Victory

The figures cited demonstrate serious successes of Soviet power in food matters — successes achieved under conditions of unprecedented and extraordinary difficulties. But the clearest figures, the most indisputable facts are disputed or hushed up when it concerns the selfish interests of the bourgeoisie, capitalists, speculators, and kulaks.

Precise investigations of urban worker nutrition have proven that he receives only approximately half his food products from the state, from the Food Commissariat, and the other half on the "open," "free" market — that is, from speculators. Moreover, for the first half the worker pays one-tenth of all his food expenses, while for the second half he pays nine-tenths.

Speculators skin the starving worker alive — they take nine skins from him.

Speculators rob him in an unprecedented manner. And we all know what a debauch of profiteering, theft, crimes, starvation for the masses of workers, and enrichment of a few scoundrels is connected with the notorious "freedom of trade" in grain.

Yet nonetheless there are defenders of free trade!

Our workers' and peasants' government, the entire Soviet republic, all our nascent socialist society finds itself in a state of the most severe, desperate, frenzied, and mortal struggle against capitalism, against speculation, against free trade in grain. This is the deepest, most fundamental, most everyday, most massive struggle of capitalism against socialism. From this struggle depends the decision of the question of the entire fate of our revolution. And people who call themselves "socialists" — social-democrats, Mensheviks, "Socialist-Revolutionaries" — are helping capitalism against socialism in this struggle! The very best of these people, those most hostile to Kolchak, Denikin, and the capitalists, constantly, in questions of Soviet power's food policy, take the side of capitalism, demanding concessions in favor of the "private trading apparatus," "individual enterprise," and so on and so forth.

In essence, if one looks carefully, if one thinks seriously about what the struggle against Soviet power is about, one reaches the conclusion: the opponents of Soviet power are divided into two large groups. Both defend capitalism against socialism. One does this brutally and with the crudest selfishness — these are the landlords, capitalists, kulaks, Denikins, Kolchaks, the Black Hundreds, and Kadets. The other group defends capitalism "ideologically" — that is, unselfishly or without direct personal selfishness, out of prejudice and fear of the new; these are the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries. These are the last "ideological" defenders of capitalism. And it is therefore no accident whatever that Kolchaks and Denikins, Russian and all foreign capitalists march under the cover of Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, under their banner, under their flag, repeating their slogans and phrases about "freedom" in general, about "democracy" in general, about "private" (trading, capitalist) enterprise, and so on and so forth.

Intelligent capitalists understand that the "ideological" position of the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries serves them, their class, "their" capitalism, while the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, like all petty-bourgeois socialists everywhere and always, do not understand this. They fear no struggle to the death against free trade in grain; they want concessions to it, recognition of it, at least in part, "peace" and agreement with it.

## What is Free Trade in Grain?

Free trade in grain is a return to capitalism, to the omnipotence of landlords and capitalists, to frenzied struggle between people for profit, to the "free" enrichment of a few, to the poverty of the masses, to their eternal bondage, which we see in all bourgeois states, not excluding the freest and most democratic republics.

If one asks any working person — a worker, a peasant, even an intellectual — whether he desires such "order," everyone will answer no. But therein lies the trouble, therein lies the danger: that a very large number of working people, especially a very large number of peasants, do not understand the connection between free trade in grain and the omnipotence of landlords and capitalists.

Written in August 1919

First published in 1930 in the journal *Proletarskaya Revolutsiya* No. 5

Printed from the manuscript