TO THE COMRADE WORKERS, FISHERS
OF THE ARAL SEA
(ADDRESS OF THE COUNCIL OF PEOPLE'S COMMISSARS, OCTOBER 7, 1921)
Dear comrades!
You, of course, have already heard the news of the enormous calamity—the unprecedented famine that has befallen the entire Volga region and part of the Urals area. From the Astrakhan Gubernia to the Tatar Republic and the Perm Gubernia, the drought has almost completely parched both the grain and the grass. Millions of people—toiling peasants and workers, millions of cattle are on the verge of perishing, and are already perishing.
Russians and Muslims, settled and nomadic—all alike face a cruel death if their comrades—workers, toiling peasants, herdsmen and fishermen from more fortunate localities—do not come to their aid. Of course, the Soviet power, for its part, is hurrying to assist the famine-stricken; it has already sent them, as an urgent measure, more than 12 million poods of grain for winter sowing, is dispatching food supplies, organising canteens and the like. But all this is not enough. The calamity is so great, the Soviet Republic is so ruined by the tsarist and White Guard war*
* In a letter of May 30, 1921, V. I. Lenin proposed to the Revolutionary Military Council to work out a plan for the use of the army on the economic front and gave concrete instructions on the ways and forms of the “economic utilisation of the army” (see Lenin Miscellany XX, p. 206).

1921 – 1922 ... data show that with state resources one can somehow feed barely one-fourth of those in need until the next harvest.

There is also nothing to count on for help from the rich capitalists. The capitalists who currently rule the mightiest states in the world—such as England, America, France—it is true, have declared to us that they, they say, also want to help our starving peasants, but on conditions that mean handing over to them all power over our workers' and peasants' republic. The matter is clear. When has it ever been seen that the bloodsucker of the working man, the capitalist and usurer, helped him disinterestedly. The capitalist class has always used the hunger of the working man to enslave his body and soul. And now they want to take advantage of our hunger to destroy our freedom won with blood, to wrench power forever from the hands of the workers and peasants and seat once again over their heads a tsar, landlord, boss, police officer, and bureaucrat.

All the hope of the starving people of Kazan, Ufa, Samara, and Astrakhan is in the great proletarian solidarity (concord) of working people like themselves, with calloused hands, earning their own living by the sweat of their brow, sucking the blood of no one. On the Aral Sea you have a fair catch of fish, and you will get by without great need. So give a part of your fish catch for the old men and women swelling from hunger, for the 8 million enfeebled toilers who, with hungry bellies, will have to perform all the heavy work of tilling the soil for almost a whole year, and finally for the 7,000,000 children who may perish before all others. Sacrifice, dear comrades, Aral fishermen and workers, with a generous hand! You will do not only an act of human conscience, but you will strengthen the cause of the workers' revolution. For you will show the whole world, and above all all the toilers, that indestructible is the might of the workers' Soviet state, built on the broadest mutual aid among proletarians of the most remote places from one another.

Let the entire working class, as one person, rise to heal* the grievous wound of the Volga region, and the fertile Volga region in future years will repay us, for its part, with its bread. Only in this way will we preserve Soviet power and defend the won freedom against all the villainous attempts of the capitalists of the whole world.

Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars

V. Ulyanov (Lenin)

Printed according to the original signed by V. I. Lenin.