Title: Work Among Deserters

In recent times, a clear turning point has been reached in the struggle against desertion. In a number of provinces, deserters have begun to return to the army en masse; without exaggeration, deserters are flocking to the Red Army. The reasons for this, first, are the more skillful and systematic work of party comrades; second, the growing awareness among peasants that Kolchak and Denikin bring about the restoration of conditions worse than those of the tsarist era, the restoration of slavery for workers and peasants, flogging, plunder, and the abuses by officers and petty nobles.

Therefore, it is necessary everywhere and with all one's might to focus on work among deserters and for their return to the army. This is one of the most urgent and pressing tasks.

Incidentally, the possibility of influencing deserters through persuasion and the success of such influence demonstrates a very special relationship between the working state and the peasantry, in contrast to the landlord and capitalist states. The discipline of the latter two types of states comes solely from the whip or the threat of starvation. For the working state or the dictatorship of the proletariat, there is another source of discipline: the persuasion of peasants by workers, the comradely union between them. When one hears eyewitness accounts of how, in certain provinces (for example, Ryazan), thousands upon thousands of deserters are voluntarily returning, and how at meetings, appeals to "comrade deserters" sometimes achieve an indescribable success, one begins to realize how much unused strength is contained in this comradely union of workers and peasants. The peasant has a prejudice that leads him to follow the capitalist, the SR, and "free trade," but he also has reason, which increasingly brings him to an alliance with the worker.