(Stormy applause, developing into an ovation.) Comrades, allow me, together with thanks for your greeting, to convey to you a greeting from the Council of People’s Commissars.

We are all still under the fresh impression of the Party Congress that has just ended and the resolutions it adopted. Everyone also knows what important tasks the Party Congress set before the workers, the peasantry, and all the working masses of the Soviet Republic. These tasks boil down to the creation of a united labour front.

At the present moment, when, to the good fortune and well-being of the Russian proletariat, we have successfully ended the civil war, with only a threat remaining from the side of Poland, directed by the zeal of the imperialists of Western Europe, an incredibly difficult transition to the ordering of our internal life now lies ahead.

To explain the tremendous turning-point and the difficulties that now confront the working class, I shall permit myself to outline all the basic stages of development through which the Russian proletariat has passed towards the communist system.

Ignorant and unconscious peasants, entering a factory for the first time — well equipped and furnished with the marvels of the latest technology — were bewildered and felt overwhelmed by the extraordinary luxury of the factory. The ignorant peasant soul saw in the manufacturer its benefactor, its provider, who gives work, without whom the worker could not survive. The helpless worker, emerging from a remote, backwoods village life into the seething cauldron of the factory, where he obtained more tolerable conditions of existence and the possibility of somehow feeding himself, fell under the oppressive yoke of capitalist exploitation. Everyone knows well how the workers of Russia and other countries lived through this hard time. But then we see how, gradually, the worker frees himself from his peasant backwardness and downtroddenness and begins to rise to a higher stage of development; we see the first attempts at struggle against the oppressors — strikes; the attempts of the scattered proletarian masses to organise themselves into trade unions; we see how the worker begins to sense a different power within himself, how any strike, even with its paltry results, yielded something priceless, new, important and meaningful. The strike taught the worker to realise that strength lies only in unity with other workers — a mighty strength capable of stopping the machines, turning the slave into a free man and enabling him to enjoy the benefits that rightfully belong to their producer. The picture of the development of the strike movement over recent decades is known to all — its gradual transition from small, fragmented strikes to broad, organised walkouts. In 1905, the strike movement swept through the whole of Russia in a mighty wave. Along with the growth of organised struggle against the capitalists by means of strikes, the worker acquires a strength unprecedented before. In this, one of the foremost places belongs to trade-union organisations. The worker arrives at the awareness that all the inventions of technology, all the machines and instruments of production that are used by the capitalists in their own interests, to the detriment of the proletariat — all this can and must become the property of the proletariat. This new phase — the phase of the workers’ organised rebuff to the capitalists with the help of trade unions — is a new step forward in the history of the development of proletarian self-awareness. The worker is no longer a will-less, helpless tool in the hands of the oppressors. The whole of the life around him convinces him that an uninterrupted, unflagging and persistent struggle is necessary. The worker obtains some improvement in his economic position, an increase in wages, a reduction in the working day. At this stage of the trade-union movement, dreams and hopes are directed towards achieving a more or less tolerable life.

But times came when even this stage of the proletariat’s class self-awareness, which in its day was a huge step forward, proved insufficient. Life drove things further.

The insolent capitalists of all countries, having squeezed the working masses, finally crushed them with the world war — a war organised both for the further oppression of the emancipating proletariat and for robbing one another of territories. The imperialist predators, armed to the teeth, threw themselves into battle. The worker was persuaded that this war was being waged in the name of some great ideas of the liberation of mankind. But the worker was not blind for long. The events of the Brest and Versailles peace treaties, the seizure of all colonies by Britain and France — these opened the worker’s eyes sufficiently to the true state of affairs. It became clear that, during the world war, ten million people perished and twenty million were maimed — and all this only for the still greater enrichment of the predators.

And, his eyes opened, the worker rises up against the yoke of capital; the social revolution blazes forth, the beginning of which was laid by the October events. Our tasks now are not only to be members of our trade-union organisations — that is no longer enough. The worker must rise still higher, so as to become from an oppressed class the ruling class. For the time being there is nothing to be hoped for from the peasantry. It is scattered, helpless, and will not soon emerge from the darkness. The peasantry can be led out of the gloom of ignorance only by that class which itself emerged from the peasantry, learned to understand wherein lies the strength of organisation, and succeeded in obtaining a better life not only under capitalism — for the workers of Western Europe also achieved that, which, however, did not save them from the war. The worker must understand that he faces a new, immeasurably more difficult task — to take the entire administration of the state into his own hands. The worker must say to himself: as long as private property exists, as long as capitalism is not smashed, no one who lives at the expense of others must hold power.

It is precisely this that the Soviet government is striving for, sympathy for which is growing among the world proletariat with extraordinary rapidity. Having created a new proletarian state, the working class has taken upon itself an unheard-of burden. The worker can abolish the exploiting classes and create socialism only by going hand in hand with the peasantry. Yet the peasants continue to farm in isolation, selling their surpluses on the free market, thereby enriching still more a handful of predators. The peasants do this unconsciously, for they live in entirely different conditions from the worker. But free trade is a return to capitalist slavery. To avoid this, labour must be organised in a new way, and there is no one to do this except the proletariat.

At the present time, the worker is not merely a member of his trade-union organisation. That point of view signifies a return to the old. The struggle against capital is not yet finished. Capitalism still hinders the initiatives of the Soviet government by means of bagmanism, the Sukharevka{125} and so on. This force can be countered only by the force of workers’ organisations built on new principles — not within the narrow framework of their own production interests, but in the interests of the entire state. Only if the whole working class, irrespective of its trades, can unite into a ruling class by creating a single army of labour — only then will it command the respect of the whole world.

Even now the peasantry, having convinced itself that by the strength of the proletariat Kolchak and Denikin were smashed, has sensed the firm hand of a good master. But it will only become fully imbued with confidence in him when any attempt to restore capitalism is made impossible. Only then will the peasant understand that there is no place in a proletarian country for kulaks and parasites. But as yet the peasant does not fully believe that the proletariat will cope with its great task.

The unheard-of privations of the last two years, which the proletariat of Russia consciously endured in the front ranks of the Red Army, are not yet exhausted. New privations and new tasks lie ahead, made all the more difficult by the greater number of victories won on the Red front. Vast territories have been conquered — Siberia and Ukraine, where there is no proletariat like the Moscow, Petrograd and Ivanovo-Voznesensk proletariat, which has proved in practice that it will not surrender the gains of the revolution at any price. Class-conscious workers must be able to penetrate all pores of state power, must be able to approach the peasantry, organising it in the interests of that class which has thrown off the yoke of the landowners and is building a state without capitalists. Self-sacrifice and iron discipline are necessary. It is necessary that the entire proletariat, as one man, display on the labour front the same unheard-of miracles as it displayed on the bloody front. At the beginning, many thought the cause of the revolution hopeless. The total disintegration of the army, mass flight from the front, the lack of shells — this is what we inherited from Kerensky. The Russian proletariat was able to weld together and rally the scattered forces, creating a single, steadfast Red Army. The Red Army performed miracles, smashing the onslaught of the capitalists, who were aided by the capitalists of the whole world. The tasks of the labour front are immeasurably more difficult still. But if the Red Army needed only men, now all the able-bodied forces of the country must be thrown onto the labour front — men, women, even adolescents. Iron discipline is needed — among us Russians this is a weak point. We must display persistence, endurance, steadfastness and unanimity. Stop at nothing. All and everyone for the salvation of the workers’ and peasants’ power and for communism.

The war is not over; it continues on the bloodless front. Here our enemies are still stronger than we are — we must admit that. World capital is going to the aid of those petty traders who sell their product on the free market — coming with readiness to resume trade relations in one hand, and in the other, readiness to strangle the proletariat and Soviet Russia.

The entire four-million-strong proletarian mass must prepare itself for new sacrifices, for new privations and calamities no fewer than those of the war. Only then can we hope to defeat the enemy definitively. The peasant, who is still waiting and wavering, will then finally believe in the strength of the proletariat. The peasant still remembers the landowners well, Denikin, Kolchak, but he also sees the loafing, the idling, and says: “It might be a good thing, but where are we to manage it!”

The peasantry must see something different. Let the working class organise production as it organised the Red Army. Let every worker be imbued with the awareness that he governs the country. The fewer of us there are, the more is demanded of us. Russia must be turned into an enormous army of labour, with a heroic awareness of self-sacrifice of everything for the common cause — the liberation of the working people.

Everyone knows that the textile industry is undergoing the greatest ruin, because there is no longer the cotton that used to be delivered from abroad, and a sharp shortage of raw material is felt even in Western Europe. The only source is Turkestan, which was only recently won back from the White Guards, but transport has not been restored.

One of the means of salvation at the present moment is the urgent extraction and working of peat, which will make it possible to run all electric power stations at full capacity and free us from complete dependence on coal regions remote from Central Russia.

Given the present devastation, we cannot count on wood fuel. The peat deposits are located mainly in the textile districts. And one of the most important tasks of the textile proletariat is to organise peat production. I know very well that this work is exceedingly hard: one has to stand knee-deep in water, without footwear and housing — the difficulties are immense. But did the Red Army have everything it needed? How many sacrifices, how many calamities were endured by the Red Army men, who for two months advanced waist-deep in water to capture the British tanks. The capitalists are hoping that the workers are exhausted and hungry and will not be able to hold out. The capitalists are lying in wait for the workers’ power, and their whole hope is that the proletariat, failing to cope with its task of a united labour front, will return them to power.

I am far from thinking that the work ahead is easy, but all difficulties must and can be overcome. Every worker must help in the organisation of labour, so that the peasantry sees in him an organiser, so that labour is regarded as the only means of preserving the workers’ and peasants’ power. When, back under Kerensky, the manufacturers became convinced that they would not remain in the factories, they sabotaged production and concluded agreements with capitalists of other countries to destroy Russian industry — anything so as not to hand it over to the workers; they exhausted the proletariat through the civil war.

The working class faces the greatest test, when every workingman and every workingwoman must perform even greater miracles than the Red Army men did at the front. Victory on the labour front, self-sacrifice in the everyday, dirty environment, is immeasurably more difficult — but a hundred times more valuable than the sacrifice of life.

Down with the old isolation! Only that worker is worthy of being a member of a trade union who has shown himself to be a member of the Red Army of Labour. Let there be hundreds of mistakes, thousands of defeats — we are not afraid of them. We must tell ourselves that only by a steadfast proletarian onslaught shall we achieve victory.

For two years the proletariat has defended the workers’ and peasants’ power. The social revolution is ripening throughout the world. To prove that we are all equal to the task entrusted to us, we must, with all energy and confidence, no matter how grave the situation, preserve all our proletarian enthusiasm and achieve on the peaceful labour front the same miracles that the Red Army achieved on the bloody front in the struggle against the imperialists and their henchmen. (Stormy applause.)

A brief newspaper report was published on April 20, 1920 in Pravda No. 83

Published in full in 1920 in the book “Minutes of the Third All-Russia Congress of the Textile Workers’ Union”, Moscow

Printed according to the book text, collated with the shorthand record