V. I.

Lenin

425

BUGUN FISHERMEN’S AND WORKERS’ SOVIET OF THE NORTHERN COAST, ARAL SEA [1]

To Comrades Workers, Fishermen of the Aral Sea

Dear Comrades:

You must have heard by now about the great disaster, the unprecedented famine which has hit the whole of the
Volga area and a part of the area west of the Urals. The
drought has almost entirely scorched the cereals and the
grasses everywhere from Astrakhan Gubernia and all the way
up to the Tatar Republic and Perm Gubernia. Millions of
people—toiling peasants and workers—and millions of head
of cattle are already dying or are about to die.

Russian and Moslem, nomad and settler—all are equally faced with cruel death unless help comes from their
comrades—workers, toiling peasants, shepherds and fishermen
from the more prosperous localities. Of course, the Soviet
power, for its part, hastens to help the starving. It has
already urgently sent them more than 12 million poods of
grain for winter sowing, and is now sending them food, organising eating places, etc. But all of this is not enough.
The disaster is so great, and the Soviet Republic has been
so ruined by the tsarist war and the whiteguards, that hardly a quarter of the needy can somehow be fed from
state resources until the next harvest.

Nor can we expect help from the wealthy capitalists.
It is true that the capitalists who now govern the strongest
states in the world—like Britain, America and France— have told us that they allegedly want to help our starving
peasants, but on terms which are tantamount to handing over to them all power over our Workers’ and Peasants’
Republic. We can well understand this. Has a bloodsucker,
a capitalist and a usurer, ever helped a toiler without
expecting something in return? The capitalist class has always
used the toiling man’s hunger to enslave him, body and soul. They now want to make use of our famine to destroy
the freedom we have won at the price of our blood, to wrest
power from the workers and peasants for ever, and to saddle
them once again with the tsar, the landowner, the master,
the police officer and the official.

The only hope of the starving in Kazan, Ufa, Samara and Astrakhan lies in the great proletarian solidarity
(sympathy) of toiling men, like themselves, with toil-hardened
hands, earning their daily bread by their own hard work,
and not sucking anyone’s blood. You have a good catch of
fish on the Aral Sea, and you will be able to live without
great need. So please set aside part of your catch for the
old men and women bloated by starvation, for the 8 million exhausted toilers, who, after all, will have to do all
the heavy work in tilling the land on an empty stomach for almost a whole year, and finally, for the 7 million
children who may be the first to die.

Dear comrades, fishermen and workers of the Aral Sea, I urge you to give with a generous hand! In so doing you
will not only be acting in human conscience, but will be
strengthening the cause of the working-class revolution.
For you will demonstrate to the whole world, and to all
the working people above all, the invincible strength of
the Soviet workers’ state, built on the broadest mutual
assistance between proletarians in areas most remote from
each other.

Let the whole working class rise as a man to heal this deep wound of the Volga area, and the fertile Volga area
will repay us with its grain in future years, That is the only way for us to preserve the Soviet power and safeguard
the freedom we have won against all the villainous attempts
of the capitalists of the world.

V. Ulyanov (Lenin )

Chairman, Council of People’s Commissars