Comrades, before beginning the report, I must say that the report is divided, as was the case at the previous congress, into two parts: a political part and an organisational part. This division first of all prompts thoughts about how the work of the CC was organised from the external, organisational side. Our Party has now lived through its first year without Y. M. Sverdlov, and this loss could not but affect the entire organisation of the CC. No one has been able to combine organisational and political work in one person as Comrade Sverdlov was able to do, and we had to try to replace his work with the work of a collegium.

The work of the CC during the reporting year, in terms of current day-to-day work, was conducted by two collegiums elected at the plenum of the CC – the Organising Bureau of the CC and the Political Bureau of the CC{100}, and, to ensure the coordination and consistency of the decisions of both these bodies, the secretary sat on both bureaus. Matters worked out in such a way that the main real task of the Orgburo was the distribution of Party forces, while the task of the Political Bureau was political questions. It goes without saying that this division is to a certain extent artificial; it goes without saying that no policy can be carried out without expressing it in appointments and transfers. Consequently, every organisational question assumes political significance, and it has become established in our practice that a request from a single member of the CC is sufficient for any question, for one reason or another, to be examined as a political question. Any attempt to distinguish the activity of the CC differently would hardly have been expedient and would hardly have achieved its goal in practice.

The indicated method of conducting affairs led to extremely favourable results: we did not have a single instance of difficulties arising between the one and the other bureau. The work of both these organs was, on the whole, harmonious, and practical application was facilitated by the presence of the secretary, with the Party secretary implementing exclusively and wholly the will of the CC. It must be stressed from the very outset, in order to eliminate any misunderstandings, that only collegial decisions of the CC, adopted in the Orgburo or the Politburo, or at the plenum of the CC – only such questions were put into practice by the secretary of the Party CC. Otherwise, the work of the CC cannot proceed correctly.

After these brief remarks on the internal routine of the CC’s work, I shall turn to my task, to the report of the CC. To give an account of the political work of the CC is a very difficult task, if understood in the literal sense of the word. During this year, an enormous part of the Politburo’s work amounted to the ongoing resolution of every arising question touching upon policy, uniting the actions of all Soviet and Party institutions, all organisations of the working class, uniting and seeking to direct all the work of the Soviet Republic. The Politburo resolved all questions of international and domestic policy. It goes without saying that setting oneself the goal of enumerating these questions approximately is impossible. In what the CC has published for the present congress, you will find the necessary material for a summary{101}. To attempt to repeat this summary in the report would be beyond my strength and, it seems to me, would be uninteresting to the delegates. Each one of us, working in one or another Party-Soviet organisation, daily follows the extraordinary succession of political questions, foreign and domestic. The very resolution of these questions, as expressed in the decrees of Soviet power, in the activity of Party organisations, at every turn, was an assessment of the Party’s CC. It must be said that there were so many questions that they had constantly to be resolved in conditions of extreme haste, and only thanks to the members of the collegium knowing each other fully, knowing the nuances of opinions, and trust, could the work be carried out. Otherwise, it would have been beyond the strength even of a collegium three times larger. It was often necessary to resolve complex questions by replacing meetings with telephone conversations. This was done with the confidence that certain, obviously complex, contentious issues would not be bypassed. Now, when I am to make a general report, I will permit myself, instead of a chronological survey and a grouping of topics, to dwell on the chief, most essential points – those which link the experience of yesterday, or rather, the experience of the year just lived through, with the tasks that stand before us.

The time for a history of Soviet power has not yet come. Even if it had come, we – I shall speak for myself, and I think for the CC – are not about to become historians, but are interested in the present and the future. We take the past reporting year as material, as a lesson, as a stepping-stone from which we must step further. From this point of view, the work of the CC falls into two main branches: the work connected with military tasks and those determining the international position of the republic, and the work of internal, peaceful economic construction, which began to come to the fore perhaps only from the end of last year or the beginning of this year, when it became fully clear that we had won a decisive victory on the decisive fronts of the civil war. In the spring of last year, our military position was extremely difficult; we were to live through, as you will recall, not a few defeats, new, vast offensives by representatives of the counter-revolution and representatives of the Entente, which had not been foreseen earlier. Therefore it is quite natural that the greater part of this period was taken up with work to fulfil the military task, the task of the civil war, a task that to all the faint-hearted – not to mention the parties of the Mensheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries and other representatives of petty-bourgeois democracy – the mass of in-between elements, appeared insoluble, a task that forced them quite sincerely to say that this task is insoluble, that Russia is backward and weakened and cannot defeat the capitalist system of the whole world, since the revolution in the West is protracted. And we therefore had to, while remaining on our position, state with complete firmness and with absolute confidence that we would win; we had to carry out the slogan – “everything for victory” and “everything for war”.

In the name of this slogan, we had to go quite consciously and openly to the neglect of a whole range of the most pressing needs, leaving very many without help time and again, in the confidence that we must concentrate all our forces on the war and win that war which the Entente had imposed on us. And only because the Party was on guard, because the Party was most strictly disciplined, and because the authority of the Party united all departments and institutions, and tens, hundreds, thousands, and ultimately millions marched as one man according to the slogan given by the CC, and only because unheard-of sacrifices were made – only because of this could the miracle that took place occur. Only because of this, despite the two, three and four-fold campaigns of the imperialists of the Entente and the imperialists of the whole world, did we prove able to win. And, of course, we do not merely stress this aspect of the matter, but we must bear in mind that this aspect of the matter constitutes a lesson, that without discipline and without centralisation we would never have accomplished this task. The unheard-of sacrifices we made to save the country from counter-revolution, for the victory of the Russian revolution over Denikin, Yudenich and Kolchak, are a pledge of the world social revolution. To bring this about, it was necessary that there be Party discipline, the strictest centralisation, absolute confidence that the unprecedentedly heavy sacrifices of tens and hundreds of thousands of people will help translate all these tasks into reality, that this can indeed be done and ensured. And for this it was necessary that our Party and the class that exercises the dictatorship, the working class, be elements uniting millions upon millions of working people both in Russia and throughout the whole world.

If we reflect on what lay, in the final analysis, in the deepest foundation of the fact that such a historical miracle occurred, that a weak, exhausted, backward country defeated the strongest countries of the world, we see that it was centralisation, discipline and unheard-of self-sacrifice. On what soil? Millions of working people in a country that was least of all educated could arrive at organisation, at the realisation of this discipline and this centralisation only on that soil that the workers who had passed through the school of capitalism are united by capitalism, that the proletariat in all the advanced countries – and the more advanced the country, the greater the extent – had become united; on the other hand, thanks to the fact that property, capitalist property, small property in commodity production, disunites. Property disunites, while we unite and are uniting an ever-greater number of millions of working people all over the world. Now this is visible, one might say, even to the blind, at least to those of them who did not want to see it. The further things go, the more our enemies became disunited. They were disunited by capitalist property, private property under commodity production – whether it be the small proprietors who speculate in the sale of grain surpluses and enrich themselves at the expense of the hungry workers, or the capitalists of various countries, even though they possessed military might and created a “League of Nations”, a “great united league” of all the advanced nations of the world. Such unity is a sheer fiction, a sheer fraud, a sheer lie. And we have seen – the greatest of examples – this notorious “League of Nations”, which tried to distribute rights to govern states, to divide up the world, this notorious union proved to be a bubble that burst at once, because it was founded on capitalist property. We have seen this on a vast historical scale; this confirms that fundamental truth on whose recognition we built our rightness, our absolute confidence in the victory of the October Revolution, in the fact that we are taking up a cause to which, despite all the difficulties, despite all obstacles, millions upon millions of working people in all countries will rally. We knew that we had allies, that one must know how to display self-sacrifice in that one country upon which history has laid the honourable, most difficult task, so that the unheard-of sacrifices would be repaid a hundredfold, because every extra month that we live on in our country gives us millions upon millions of allies in all countries.

If, in the final analysis, we think about why it turned out that we were able to win, that we had to win, it was only because all our enemies, formally linked by any kind of ties with the strongest governments and representatives of capital in the world – however formally united they might be – proved to be disunited, their inner connection in essence itself disunited them, hurled them against each other, and capitalist property decomposed them, turned them from allies into wild beasts, so that they did not see that Soviet Russia was increasing the number of its supporters among the English soldiers landed in Arkhangelsk, among the French sailors landed in Sevastopol, among the workers of all countries, where the social-compromisers, in all advanced countries without exception, took the side of capital. And this fundamental reason, the deepest reason, in the final analysis gave us the most certain victory, it was that source which continues to be the chief, invincible, inexhaustible source of our strength and which permits us to say that when we have fully realised the dictatorship of the proletariat in our own country, the greatest unification of its forces, through the vanguard, through its advanced party, we can expect a world revolution. And this is in fact the expression of the will, the expression of proletarian resolve to struggle, the expression of proletarian resolve for an alliance of millions and tens of millions of workers in all countries.

This is what the gentlemen of the bourgeoisie and the so-called socialists of the Second International declared to be agitation phrases. No, this is a historical reality, confirmed by the bloody and heavy experience of the civil war in Russia, for this civil war was a war against world capital, and that capital fell apart of itself in the fight, devoured itself, whereas we emerged more hardened, stronger, in a country of a proletariat dying of hunger and typhus. In this country, we drew to ourselves ever more working people. What earlier seemed to the compromisers an agitation phrase, what the bourgeoisie was accustomed to mock, this year of our revolution, and above all the reporting year, has at last turned into an indisputable historical fact, which makes it possible to say with the most positive confidence: if we have done this, then it thereby confirms that we have a worldwide foundation, infinitely broader than in any former revolutions whatsoever. We have an international alliance which is nowhere recorded, not formalised, representing nothing from the point of view of “state law”, but in reality, in the decaying capitalist world, constitutes everything. Each month during which we won back our positions or when we simply held out against an unprecedentedly mighty enemy proved to the whole world that we were right, and gave us new millions of people.

This process seemed difficult, was accompanied by gigantic defeats. The unheard-of White terror in Finland{102} was followed, right in the reporting year, by the defeat of the Hungarian revolution, which was strangled by representatives of the Entente under a secret treaty with Rumania, deceiving their own parliaments.

This was the most vile betrayal, a conspiracy of the international Entente to strangle the Hungarian revolution with White terror, to say nothing of how in every way they entered into agreements with the German compromisers in order to strangle the German revolution{103}; how these people, having declared Liebknecht an honest German, fell upon that honest German like mad dogs together with the German imperialists. They exceeded everything possible, and every such suppression on their part only strengthened and reinforced us, undermined the ground under their feet.

And I think that this basic experience which we have undergone must be taken most into account by us. Here we must above all consider making the basis of our agitation and propaganda an analysis, an explanation of why we won, why these sacrifices of the civil war were repaid a hundredfold, and how we must act on the basis of this experience in order to win victory in another war, a war on the bloodless front, a war that has only changed its form, but is still waged against us by the very same old representatives, servants and leaders of the old capitalist world, only yet more zealously, furiously and ardently. In our revolution, more than in any other, the law has been confirmed that the strength of a revolution, the strength of the onslaught, energy, determination and triumph of its victory at the same time increase the strength of the resistance of the bourgeoisie. The more we win, the more the capitalist exploiters learn to unite and go over to more resolute offensives. For you all remember perfectly well – it was not so long ago in terms of time, but long ago in terms of current events – you remember that Bolshevism was regarded at the beginning of the October Revolution as a curiosity; and if in Russia this view very soon had to be abandoned, this view, which was an expression of the immaturity and weakness of the proletarian revolution, was abandoned in Europe as well. Bolshevism became a world phenomenon, the workers’ revolution raised its head. The Soviet system – in which we, creating it in October, followed the behests of 1905, working out our own experience – this Soviet system proved to be a world-historical phenomenon.

Now two camps stand opposed to each other in full consciousness, on a worldwide scale, without the slightest exaggeration. It must be noted that it was only during this year that they stood opposed in a decisive and final struggle, and we are now, right at the time of the congress, living through what is perhaps one of the greatest, sharpest, unfinished, transitional moments from war to peace.

You all know how the leaders of the imperialist powers of the Entente, who shouted to the whole world: “we shall never cease war against the usurpers, bandits, usurpers of power, opponents of democracy, the Bolsheviks” – you know how they first lifted the blockade, how their attempt to unite the small powers collapsed, because we succeeded in winning over to our side not only the workers of all countries, but we also succeeded in winning over the bourgeoisie of the small countries, because the imperialists are oppressors not only of the workers of their own countries, but also of the bourgeoisie of the small states. You know how we won over the wavering bourgeoisie within the advanced countries, and now the moment has come when the Entente is breaking its former promises, behests, breaking its treaties, which it, among other things, concluded dozens of times with various Russian White Guards, and now with these treaties it is left sitting by a broken trough, because on these treaties it threw away hundreds of millions and did not carry the matter through to the end.

Now, having lifted the blockade, it has begun de facto peace negotiations with the Soviet Republic, and now it is not bringing these negotiations to an end, so the small powers have lost faith in it, faith in its forces. We see that the position of the Entente, its external position, absolutely cannot be defined from the point of view of the usual concepts of jurisprudence. The Entente states are with the Bolsheviks neither in peace nor in war, they recognise us and they do not recognise us. And this complete disintegration of our adversaries, who were convinced that they represented something, shows that they represent nothing except a bunch of capitalist beasts who have quarrelled among themselves and are completely powerless to do anything to us.

Now the situation is such that formal peace proposals have been made to us by Latvia{104}; Finland has sent a telegram in which it speaks officially of a demarcation line, but in essence this is a transition to a peaceful policy{105}. Finally, Poland – that Poland whose representatives rattled their sabres particularly loudly and continue to rattle them, that Poland which has received and is receiving most trainloads of artillery and promises of all kinds of help, as long as Poland continues the struggle against Russia – even this Poland, the unstable position of whose government compels it to venture on any kind of adventure with war, even this Poland has sent an invitation to open peace negotiations{106}. We must be extremely cautious. Our policy demands most of all an attentive attitude. Here it is hardest of all to find the correct line, because no one yet knows the rails on which the train stands – even the enemy himself does not know what he will do next. The gentlemen representatives of French policy, who are most egging on Poland, and the leaders of landlord-bourgeois Poland do not know what will happen next, they do not know what they want. Today they say: “Gentlemen, a few trainloads of cannons, a few hundred millions, and we are ready to wage war against the Bolsheviks.” They conceal news of the strikes that are growing in Poland, they tighten censorship in order to hide the truth. Yet the revolutionary movement there is growing. The revolutionary upsurge in Germany, in its new phase, in its new stage, when the workers, after the German Kornilovism, are creating Red armies, says directly (the latest telegrams from there) that the workers are catching fire more and more. In the consciousness of the very representatives of the bourgeois-landlord Poland the thought is beginning to penetrate: “Is it not too late, will not the Soviet Republic be in Poland before the perpetration of a state act, peaceful or military?” They do not know what to do. They do not know what tomorrow will bring them.

We know that each month gives us a gigantic strengthening of our forces and will give more. Therefore we now stand in the international respect more firmly than ever before. But we must regard the international crisis with extreme attentiveness and readiness to meet any unexpected events whatsoever. We have a formal peace proposal from Poland. Those gentlemen are in a desperate position, so desperate that their friends, the German monarchists, people of greater breeding, with greater political experience and knowledge, rushed into an adventure, into Kornilovism. The Polish bourgeoisie is throwing out a peace proposal, knowing that an adventure might become a Polish Kornilovism. Knowing that our adversary is in a desperately difficult position – an adversary who does not know what he wants to do, what he will do tomorrow – we must tell ourselves with complete firmness that, despite the fact that a peace proposal has been made, war is possible. Their further behaviour is impossible to foresee. We have seen these people, we know these Kerenskys, Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries. During these two years we have seen how they were pushed one day towards Kolchak, the next day almost towards the Bolsheviks, then towards Denikin, and all of this was covered with phrases about freedom and democracy. We know these gentlemen, and therefore we grasp the peace proposal with both hands, agreeing to the maximum concessions, convinced that peace with the small countries will advance the cause infinitely better than war, because through war the imperialists deceived the working masses, concealed the truth about Soviet Russia under this, and therefore any peace will open the road to our influence a hundredfold wider and broader. And it is already great, after these years. The Third, Communist International has won unheard-of victories. But we know at the same time that war can be imposed upon us any day. Our adversaries themselves do not yet know what they are capable of in this respect.

That military preparations are going on, there is no doubt whatsoever. Many neighbours of Russia are now resorting to this state arming, and perhaps many non-neighbouring states. That is why we must above all manoeuvre in our international policy and hold most firmly to the course we have taken, and be prepared for anything. We have carried on the war for peace with extraordinary energy. This war is yielding superb results. In this field of struggle we have shown ourselves best, at least no worse than in the field of activity of the Red Army, on the bloody front. But it does not depend on the will of the small states, even if they wanted peace, it does not depend on their will whether they conclude peace with us. They are up to their necks in debt to the countries of the Entente, and there a desperate squabbling and rivalry among themselves is going on. Therefore we must remember that peace, from the point of view of the world-historical scale substantiated by the civil war and the war against the Entente, is, of course, possible.

But we must accompany our steps towards peace with the straining of all our military preparedness, in no case disarming our army. Our army is a real guarantee that the imperialist powers will make not the slightest attempts, not the slightest encroachments, for although they might count on some ephemeral successes at the beginning, not one of them will remain without being smashed by Soviet Russia. This we must know, this must be the basis of our agitation and propaganda, and for this we must know how to prepare ourselves and solve the task which, given the growing tiredness, forces us to combine the one with the other.

I pass to the most important considerations of principle that forced us resolutely to direct the working masses toward the path of using the army to solve the basic and immediate tasks. The old source of discipline, capital, is weakened; the old source of unification has disappeared. We must create a different discipline, a different source of discipline and unification. That which is coercion arouses indignation and shouts, and noise, and howls from bourgeois democracy, which makes a fuss about the words “freedom” and “equality”, without understanding that freedom for capital is a crime against the workers, that equality of the sated and the hungry is a crime against the working people. We, in the name of the struggle against lies, have taken the stand that we are putting into effect labour conscription and the unification of the working people, not at all fearing coercion, for nowhere was a revolution carried out without coercion, and the proletariat has the right to exercise coercion in order at all costs to hold on to what is its own. When the gentlemen of the bourgeoisie, the gentlemen compromisers, the gentlemen of the German “Independents”, the Austrian “Independents” and the French Longuetists argued about the historical factor, they always forgot such a factor as the revolutionary determination, firmness and inflexibility of the proletariat. And this is precisely the inflexibility and hardiness of the proletariat of our country, which told itself and others and proved in deed that we would sooner perish, every last one of us, than give up our territory, than surrender our principle – the principle of discipline and firm policy, for which we must all sacrifice. At the moment of the disintegration of the capitalist countries, of the capitalist class, at the moment of its despair and crisis, only this political factor decides. Phrases about minority and majority, about democracy and freedom, decide nothing, however much the heroes of the past historical period may point to them. Here it is the consciousness and firmness of the working class that decide. If it is ready for self-sacrifice, if it has proved that it knows how to strain all its forces, then this solves the task. Everything for the solution of this task. The determination of the working class, its inflexibility to carry out its slogan – “we would sooner perish than surrender” – is not only a historical factor, but a factor that is decisive, victorious.

From this victory, from this confidence, we are moving on, and we have arrived at those tasks of peaceful economic construction whose solution constitutes the main function of our congress. In this respect, one cannot, in my opinion, speak of a report of the Politburo of the CC or, rather, of the political report of the CC; one must say directly and openly: yes, Comrades, this is a question that you will decide, which you must weigh with the authority of the highest Party instance. We have sketched this question before you with clarity. We have taken a definite position. Your duty is to definitively confirm, correct or change our decision. But the CC in its report must say that it has taken a completely definite position on this fundamental, burning question. Yes, the task now consists in applying to the peaceful tasks of economic construction, the tasks of restoring destroyed production, everything that the proletariat and its absolute unity can concentrate. What is needed here is iron discipline, an iron order, without which we would not have held out for not only two and a half years but even two months. We must know how to apply our victory. On the other hand, we must understand that this transition requires many sacrifices, which the country has already borne more than enough of.

The principled side of the matter was clear for the CC. All our activity was subordinated to this policy, directed in this spirit. A question, for example, which seems a detail, which in itself, if torn out of context, of course cannot claim a cardinal principled significance – the question of collegiality and one-man management, which you will decide – must at all costs be placed under the angle of the basic acquisitions of our knowledge, our experience, our revolutionary practice. For instance, we are told: “Collegiality is one of the forms of participation of the broad masses in administration.” But in the CC we have spoken on this question, we have made decisions, and we must report to you: Comrades, one cannot put up with such theoretical confusion. If on the basic question of our military activity, our civil war, we had allowed one-tenth of such theoretical confusion, we would have been beaten, and deservedly beaten.

Permit me, Comrades, in connection with the CC report and in connection with the question of the participation of the new class in administration on the basis of collegiality or one-man management, to bring in a little theory, to indicate how a class rules, in what the domination of a class is expressed. We are, after all, not novices in this respect, and our revolution differs from previous revolutions in that there is no utopianism in our revolution. If a new class has come to replace the old class, it will only hold its own in a furious struggle with other classes, and it will only win through to the end if it succeeds in bringing about the abolition of classes in general. The gigantic, complex process of the class struggle poses the matter thus; otherwise you will wallow in the bog of confusion. In what is the domination of a class expressed? In what was the domination of the bourgeoisie over the feudal lords expressed? In the constitution, it was written about freedom, about equality. That is a lie. As long as there are working people, owners are capable, and even compelled, as owners, to speculate. We say that there is no equality, the sated is not equal to the hungry, and the speculator is not equal to the working person.

In what is the domination of a class expressed today? The domination of the proletariat is expressed in that the landowner and capitalist property has been taken away. The spirit, the basic content of all previous constitutions, right down to the most republican, democratic, reduced itself to property alone. Our Constitution is entitled to and has won for itself the right to historical existence because it is not only written on paper that property is abolished. The victorious proletariat abolished and destroyed property to the end – that is what the domination of a class consists in. First and foremost in the question of property. When we practically settled the question of property, thereby the domination of the class was ensured. When the Constitution subsequently wrote on paper what life had decided – the abolition of capitalist, landowner property – and added: the working class under the Constitution has more rights than the peasantry, and exploiters have no rights at all – thereby it was recorded that we had realised the domination of our class, with which we bound to ourselves the working people of all strata and small groups.

The petty-bourgeois owners are fragmented; those among them who have larger property are enemies of those who have less, and the proletarians, abolishing property, declare open war on them. There are still many people who are unconscious, benighted, who are entirely for any kind of free trade, but who, when they see discipline, self-sacrifice in the victory over exploiters, cannot wage war; they are not for us, but they are powerless to come out against us. Only by the domination of a class is the relation of property determined and the relation of which class is on top. Whoever links the question, in what the domination of a class is expressed, with the question of democratic centralism, as we often observe, introduces such confusion that no successful work can proceed on that soil. Clarity of propaganda and agitation is the basic condition. If our opponents said and acknowledged that we have performed miracles in the development of agitation and propaganda, then this must be understood not in an external way, that we had many agitators and much paper was spent, but this must be understood in an internal way, that the truth that was in this agitation forced its way into the heads of all. And one cannot deviate from this truth.

When classes replaced one another, they changed the relation to property. The bourgeoisie, replacing feudalism, changed the relation to property; the constitution of the bourgeoisie says: “He who has property is equal to him who is a pauper.” That was the freedom of the bourgeoisie. This “equality” gave domination in the state to the capitalist class. And what then – do you think that when the bourgeoisie replaced feudalism, it confused the state with administration? No, they were not such fools; they said that in order to administer, one must have people skilled in administration, and for this we shall take feudal lords and remake them. They did just that. So, was this a mistake? No, Comrades, the ability to administer does not fall from the sky and does not come by the holy spirit, and merely because a given class is the advanced class does not make it immediately capable of administration. We see from the example: while the bourgeoisie was winning, it took for administration people who came from another, the feudal class, and it had nowhere else to take them from. One must look at things soberly: the bourgeoisie took the previous class, and now we also have the task – to know how to take, subordinate, use its knowledge, training, to use all this for the victory of the class. Therefore we say that the victorious class must be mature, and maturity is attested not by a certificate or a diploma, it is attested by experience, by practice.

The bourgeois won without knowing how to administer, and they secured their victory by proclaiming a new constitution and recruiting, selecting administrators from their own class and began to learn, using administrators from the previous class, and began to teach their own new ones, preparing them for administration, setting in motion the entire state apparatus for this, sequestering feudal institutions, putting those who are wealthy through school, and thus, over long years and decades, they prepared administrators from their own class. Now, in a state organised in the image and likeness of the ruling class, one must do what was done in all states. If we do not want to adopt the position of purest utopianism and empty phrases, we must say that we must take account of the experience of previous years, we must secure the Constitution won by the revolution, but for administration, for state organisation, we must have people who possess the technique of administration, who have state and economic experience, and we have nowhere to take such people except from the previous class.

Time and again the discourse about collegiality is permeated with the most ignorant spirit, the spirit of hostility to specialists. With such a spirit one cannot win. In order to win, one must understand the entire profound history of the old bourgeois world, and in order to build communism, one must take technique and science and set them in motion for broader circles, and we have nowhere to take them except from the bourgeoisie. This basic question must be put forward prominently, must be included among the basic tasks of economic construction. We must administer with the help of people who came from the class we overthrew – people who are steeped in the prejudices of their class and whom we must retrain. At the same time, we must recruit our own administrators from the ranks of our own class. We must use the entire state apparatus so that educational institutions, out-of-school education, practical training – all of this proceeds, under the guidance of Communists, for the proletarians, for the workers, for the working peasants.

Only thus can we handle the matter. After our two years’ experience, we cannot talk as if we have taken up socialist construction for the first time. We committed enough foolishness during the period of Smolny and around Smolny. There is nothing shameful in that. Where was one to get wits, when we first took up a new cause! We tried this way, we tried that way. We drifted with the current, because it was impossible to single out the element of what was correct and what was incorrect – time was needed for that. Now that is a recent past, from which we have emerged. That past, when chaos and enthusiasm reigned, is gone. A document of that past is the Peace of Brest-Litovsk. It is a historical document, more than that – it is a historical period. The Peace of Brest-Litovsk was imposed upon us because we were powerless in all fields. What was that period? It was a period of powerlessness, from which we emerged as victors. It was a period of unrelieved collegiality. One cannot leap out of this historical fact when they say that collegiality is the school of administration. But one cannot sit all the time in the preparatory class of the school! (Applause.) That number will not work. We are now adults, and we shall be beaten and beaten in all fields if we act as schoolchildren. We must advance. We must rise higher with energy, with unity of will. Gigantic difficulties are falling on the trade unions. We must achieve it that they master this task in the spirit of struggle against the remnants of the notorious democratism. All these shouts about appointmentees, all this old, harmful rubbish that finds a place in various resolutions and discussions, must be swept out. Otherwise we cannot win. If we have not