V. I. Lenin

Speech Delivered at an All-Russia
Congress

Of Glass and Porcelain Workers

April 29, 1920

Yesterday brought us two pieces of news: the first is very bad—a report about a manifesto by Pilsudski, head
of the Polish Government. I have not yet seen the text of this
manifesto; I was told of it on the telephone. One thing is
certain, however, that it is tantamount to Poland’s declaration of war on the Ukraine. The French
imperialists’ influence has evidently gained the upper hand in Poland’s government circles. The Polish Government
has decided to drop its recent policy of tacking and manoeuvring
around the peace negotiations with us, and to start hostilities
on a wider front. The Poles have already captured Zhitomir and
are marching on Kiev. This demands of us the most determined and
urgent defence of the interests of the proletariat. We do not
doubt that we shall be able to defend those interests; we do not
doubt that this new attempt by the Entente imperialists to
strangle Soviet Russia will fall through just as the Denikin
and. the Kolchak ventures have. Poland is obviously getting all
her military support from France, Britain, and the entire
Entente It is highly characteristic, in this connection, that in
the last stage of the negotiations with us about the Crimea the
British Government has considerably changed its originally
favourable attitude. In reply to Great Britain’s call to
us to show clemency to Denikin’s soldiers, who are being
driven into the sea, we have said that we were prepared to spare
the lives of the Crimean whiteguards if, for its part, the
Entente shows clemency to the defeated Hungarian Communists and
allows them to enter Soviet Russia.

We do not need to shed the blood of these Crimean whiteguards;
we are not vindictive. We have, however, received no reply to our
Note from the British Government, which, in connection with
Poland’s action, seems in no hurry to reply. But we are sure
that no supporters of intervention are to be found among the
British workers, even the most opportunistically minded.

We have information to the effect that even in Poland the
Polish Socialist Party, which has persecuted Polish Communists,
has stated in its newspaper that Poland should not break off peace
negotiations with Soviet Russia by presenting an ultimatum
demanding that these talks should be conducted in Borisov. This
newspaper considers such conduct by the Polish Government a
crime. The Poles have proposed that the peace talks should take
place in Borisov without any cessation of hostilities. Conducting
negotiations in this particular place would prevent us from
continuing hostilities during the talks, while giving Poland
complete freedom of action in this respect. Of course, we could
not conduct peace negotiations on such terms, and we proposed that
they should be transferred to Paris, Revel, Warsaw, Moscow or some
other city mutually agreed upon with Poland. The reply to this
proposal was an extensive Polish offensive along the entire
front. We have no doubt that the Polish Government started this
war of aggression in defiance of the wishes of its workers. That
is why we face this new military gamble quite calmly; we know that
we shall emerge the victors. But you know, comrades, that any war
is accompanied by tremendous difficulties, to overcome which we
have more than onoe appealed to the worker masses for support. The
war with Poland has been forced upon us. We have no designs
whatever on Poland’s independence, just as we have no designs on the independence of Lithuania or Byelorussia. Yet,
despite all our willingness to come to terms, war has been forced
upon us; that being the case, we must rise up as one man to defend
both ourselves and the Ukraine from the onslaught of the Polish
imperialists. (Loud applause.) For that purpose we must
again make a certain change of plans. However much we might desire
to go over to peaceful construction as soon as possible and on the
greatest possible scale, the fact that war has been forced upon us
makes it imperative that we subordinate everything to the demands
of that war so as to achieve the most successful and rapid
results. We must explain to the workers and peasants why an
Entente-instigated Poland has launched a war against us. We must
explain that this has been done in order to widen the barrier and
deepen the gulf separating the proletariat of Germany from us.

On the other hand, we received news from Baku yesterday which
shows that the position of Soviet Russia is improving. We know
that our industry is at a standstill owing to lack of fuel. News
has come in that the Baku proletariat has taken over power and
overthrown the Azerbaijan Government. This means that we now have
an economic base that may put life into our whole industry. In
Baku there is a million poods of oil which could not be sold, with the result that even Nobel,
the oil magnate, tried to start, talks with us for the delivery of
this oil to Soviet Russia. Thus our railways and industry will
receive very substantial aid from the Baku oilfields.

Comrade Tsyurupa, the People’s Commissar for Food, informed me today that in Kuban Region and in the Caucasus there
are vast stocks of grain which we can count on having sent
here. That means that we shall have fuel for industry and bread
for the people. By exerting every effort to restore the transport
system, we shall be able to secure bread and oil, which will serve
as a sound economic basis for relations between the workers and
the peasants. We say that the peasants must give their surplus
grain to the workers because under present-day conditions, the
sale of these surpluses would be a crime. Consequently, as soon as
we get our industry going, we shall make every effort to satisfy
the peasants’ need of manufactured goods from the cities.

After outlining the Republic’s general position today in
these few words and to the extent permitted by the time, I shall
take the liberty of concluding by expressing the conviction that
at the present moment, at this new stage of our relations with
Poland, when both Kuban grain and Baku oil have been made
available to us, the four million workers organised in the trade
unions, through whom we have conducted our Soviet policy with the
backing of the broad strata of the peasants, will, without
confining themselves to the narrow limits of their trade union
life, go on giving every support to the further success and
development of the proletariat’s common cause. We know that
the workers’ class-consciousness and unity and the complete
solidarity of the trade unions. have been the only force that have
made possible the brilliant victories of the Red Army, an army
which has been the finest medium of spreading political
enlightenment among the peasants, teaching them to oust
self-seekers from their ranks so as to keep power in the hands of
the workers. Now, too, we need that class-consciousness, that
unity and complete solidarity of the trade unions in the war
against Poland and in the work of restoring industry. What we need
today is the further maintenance and tightening of the discipline
necessary in all branches of production. The class-conscious
workers know that if you, the workers, had not displayed this
discipline hitherto, we might have suffered the fate of
Hungary. Let the comrades remember that and, in their localities,
ensure the complete subordination of all to the one fundamental
task: we must abolish, we must eliminate as soon as possible the
accursed motto-every man for himself and the devil take the
hindmost. Proletarian labour discipline must be raised to the
highest pitch of intensity-and then we shall be invincible. We
will show that the Soviet Republic cannot be overthrown and that
we shall succeed in winning the aid of all the other republics of
the world. (Continuous applause from all members of the Congress; cries of “Long live our leader Comrade
Lenin!”)