Comrades, as I sum up briefly the work of our Congress, we must, in my view, first of all dwell on the tasks of our party. The Congress adopted a detailed resolution on the organizational question, and the most important place in this resolution, as was to be expected, is occupied by the question of education, of training, of the organizational utilization of the members of our party. The Credentials Commission reported that at this Congress there are represented over 600,000 members of our party. We all know well what enormous difficulties the party had to endure during these militant times, how we had to struggle against the fact that into the governmental party—naturally an open one, because it is a governmental party, and one that opens the way to power—the worst elements, the dregs of old capitalism, could not attach themselves and gain admission. And one of the means of struggle was the institution of Party Weeks. Only under such conditions, only at such moments, when the party and the movement were experiencing especially difficult circumstances, when Denikin stood to the north of Orel and Yudenich—fifty versts from Petrograd, only then could people join the party who were sincerely devoted to the cause of the emancipation of the laboring masses.

These conditions will not, at least in the immediate future, be repeated, and it must be said that the enormous number of members of our party, compared with previous congresses, which has been achieved and realized, gives rise to certain anxieties, and there is a perfectly real danger consisting in the fact that the rapid growth of our party has not always kept pace with the degree to which we have educated this mass for its actual tasks. We must constantly bear in mind that this army of 600,000 members must be the vanguard of the working class, that without iron discipline it would hardly have been possible to accomplish our tasks in the course of two years. The fundamental condition for the application and maintenance of our strictest discipline is devotion: all the old means and sources of the application of discipline have been destroyed; the basis of our activity has been only a high degree of thoughtfulness and consciousness. This gave us the possibility of implementing such discipline as stands above the discipline of any other state and which rests on a foundation unlike that discipline which continues to hold on somehow, if it can still hold on, in capitalist society. Therefore, we must remember that our task for the coming year, after brilliant successes in war, consists not so much in the expansion of the party as in internal work, in the sense of developing the composition of our party. Our resolutions on the organizational question devote the maximum attention to this not without reason.

We must achieve by all means that this vanguard of the proletariat, this army of 600,000 members, be equal to those tasks that fall upon it, and tasks of gigantic importance fall upon it—international and internal! As for international tasks, our international position has never been as excellent as at the present time. However rarely news from abroad reaches us about the life of the workers there, but every time one receives a couple of letters or several issues of European and American workers' socialist newspapers, one experiences the highest satisfaction, because one sees how in the masses, completely untouched by propaganda before or languishing in wretched opportunism, in purely parliamentary socialism, everywhere and on all sides, far more than we know, in every corner of the earth, everywhere there is observed an enormous growth of interest in Soviet power, in new tasks, everywhere there is a profound revolutionary movement, fermentation, the raising of revolutionary questions.

Yesterday I happened to become acquainted with an issue of the newspaper of the English socialist workers' party. The English workers, who had intellectualist leaders, who for decades were distinguished by contempt for theory, now speak with complete certainty, and the newspaper testifies that now among English workers there is interest in the question of revolution, interest in the struggle against revisionism, opportunism, parliamentary socialism, against this social betrayal that we have studied so well, has arisen and strengthened. This struggle is becoming the order of the day! We can say with certainty that the American comrade R. was entirely correct, who published a thick book containing a series of articles by Trotsky and myself and thus providing a summary of the history of the Russian Revolution. This comrade says that the French Revolution proved victorious on a world-historical scale, and if it could be directly crushed, it was because it was surrounded by countries on the European continent more backward, in which similar movements of imitation, sympathy, and support could not immediately arise. The Russian Revolution, which had to arise earlier than others by force of the oppression of Tsarism and a whole series of other conditions (connection with 1905, etc.), is surrounded by countries standing at a higher stage of capitalist development, which approach the revolution more slowly, but more solidly, more stably, more firmly! We see that each year and even each month the number of supporters and friends of the Soviet Republic within each capitalist country grows by 10, by 100, by 1,000 times, and it must be said that we have more friends and allies than we know!

The attempt of world imperialism to crush us by military means has suffered complete failure! Now our international position has given us a much longer and more stable respite than the one we had at the beginning of the revolution. But we must remember that this is nothing more than a respite. We must remember that the entire capitalist world is armed to the teeth and is waiting for the moment, choosing the best strategic conditions, investigating methods of attack. We cannot in any case forget that at present all economic force and all military force are still on its side! On a world scale still weak, we are growing rapidly, becoming stronger, wresting from the enemy's hands one weapon after another, but the enemy lies in ambush for the Soviet Republic at every step! Now international capital goes with a definite intention, with a calculated plan, so that with the lifting of the blockade international speculation, international free trade might be combined, merged, united with our internal speculation and prepare on the soil of this speculation a new war for us, prepare a new series of snares, traps.

Here we approach the fundamental task that was the main question, the main subject of attention of our Congress. This is the task of construction. In this respect the Congress gave a great deal, namely: unanimously a resolution was adopted on the chief question of economic construction and transport. And we now, thanks to Party education, will ensure that this resolution is carried out by all three million workers in the trade unions as one man. We will ensure that this resolution serves to direct all our strength, discipline, energy toward the restoration of the country's economy, first and foremost—the restoration of transport, and secondly—the restoration of the food situation.

For propaganda we now have a whole series of questions, and in this respect every piece of information from abroad and every new ten members of the party give us new material for propaganda. Propaganda must proceed in its course, without scattering, without dissipating our forces. We must firmly remember that the source of the successes, the miracles that we displayed in military affairs, was that we always concentrated on the main thing, the fundamental thing; we resolved the matter in a way that capitalist society was unable to resolve it! The point is that capitalist society decides everything that especially interests citizens—their economic conditions of existence, war and peace—everything is decided secretly from society itself by capitalist society; the most important questions—war, peace, diplomatic questions—are decided by a tiny handful of capitalists who deceive not only the masses, but often deceive even Parliament. There is no parliament in the world that has ever said anything serious on the question of war and peace! In capitalist society the chief questions of the economic life of the laboring masses, their condition of hungry or good existence—all this is decided by the capitalist as master, as god! In all capitalist countries, in democratic republics, the attention of the people during such periods is distracted by that venal bourgeois press which is called freedom of speech, which invents and sets in circulation everything in order to fool, deceive this mass! On the contrary, with us the entire apparatus of state power, all the attention of the conscious worker was concentrated wholly and exclusively on the main, the responsible moment, on the main task! In the military sphere we achieved gigantic success in this respect, and this experience we must now transfer to the economic sphere.

We are making the transition to socialism, and the most essential question—about bread, about work—is not a private question, not a private matter of an entrepreneur, but a question of all of society, when each and every peasant who thinks at all must definitely understand and realize that if the state in all its press, in every article, in every newspaper issue raises the question of transport, then this is a general concern! This construction is a transition for the peasant from that blindness and darkness which condemned him to slavery, to actual freedom, to that when the laboring masses know all the difficulties that lie before them, and all the forces of social organization, all the forces of the state apparatus, all the forces of agitation are directed at the simplest and most essential, discarding the glitter, the trinkets, and the playing with all sorts of resolutions and the cleverest promises with which newspaper agitators of any bourgeois country occupy themselves! We must concentrate all forces, all attention on these simplest economic tasks, which are understandable to each peasant, against which no honest middle peasant, even a well-to-do one, can object, and when these are raised at any meeting we are always absolutely in the right. The least conscious worker and peasant mass will confirm that the main thing is to restore the economy now in such a way that it cannot again fall into the hands of exploiters, so that the man who, in a hungry country, having surplus grain, uses it to enrich himself and cause the poor to starve, does not receive the least concession. You will not find the darkest, the least conscious person who does not have the consciousness that this is unjust, in whom there does not flicker a vague, unclear, but nonetheless flickering thought that the arguments put forth by the supporters of Soviet power correspond entirely with the interests of the laboring masses.

On these simple tasks, which in large capitalist societies are pushed into the background and considered a private matter of the masters, on these questions we must concentrate all the attention of the entire army of 600,000 party members, among whom we must not tolerate a single one who is not fulfilling his task, in the name of this we must force the workers with the greatest self-sacrifice and devotion to join us in full! This is difficult to organize, but this has enormous moral authority and gigantic force of persuasion—this is just from the point of view of the laboring masses! And so in the confidence that this task, thanks to the work of the Congress, will now be able to be resolved just as brilliantly, though at the cost of a series of defeats and a series of errors, as we resolved the military task, in this confidence we can say that workers of all European and American countries are now looking at us with expectation: will we resolve this more difficult task that lies before us, for this task is more difficult than the task of military victory! It cannot be resolved by simple enthusiasm and simple self-sacrifice and heroic upsurge alone! In this work of organization, in which we Russians were weaker than others, in this work of self-discipline, in this work of ability to discard the extraneous and to achieve the main thing, nothing can be done quickly, and in this sphere of grain collection, repair of transport, restoration of the economy, which moves only inch by inch, where the soil is being prepared and small but solid work is being done—in this work the workers of all countries are looking at us, expecting our new victories! I am confident that, relying on the decisions of our Congress, having ensured that the 600,000 party members work as one man, having established closer connections with the economic organs and with the organs of the trade unions, we will be able to resolve this task just as victoriously as we resolved the military task, and we will go quickly and firmly toward the victory of the World Socialist Soviet Republic! (Applause.)