V. I. Lenin

The best way to celebrate the anniversary of a great revolution
is to concentrate attention on its unsolved problems. It is
particularly appropriate and necessary to celebrate the
revolution in this way at a time when we are faced with
fundamental problems that the revolution has not yet solved, and
when we must master something new (from the point of view of
what the revolution has accomplished up to now) for the solution
of these problems.

What is new for our revolution at the present time is the need
for a “reformist”, gradual, cautious and round-about approach to the solution of the fundamental problems
of economic development. This “novelty” gives rise to a number of questions, perplexities and doubts in both theory
and practice.

A theoretical question. How can we explain the transition from a
series of extremely revolutionary actions to extremely “reformist” actions in the same field at a time when
the revolution as a whole is making victorious progress? Does it
not imply a “surrender of positions”, an “admission of defeat”, or something of that sort?
Of course, our enemies—from the semi-feudal type of reactionaries to the Mensheviks or other knights of the
Two-and-a-Half International—say that it does. They would
not be enemies if they did not shout something of the sort on
every pretext, and even without any pretext. The touching
unanimity that prevails on this question among all parties, from
the feudal reactionaries to the Mensheviks, is only further
proof that all these parties constitute “one reactionary
mass” opposed to the proletarian revolution (as Engels foresaw in his letters to Bebel of 1875 and 1884—be it
said in parenthesis). [1]

But there is “perplexity”, shall we say, among friends, too.

Restore large-scale industry, organise the direct exchange of
its goods for the produce of small-peasant farming, and thus
assist the socialisation of the latter. For the purpose of
restoring large-scale industry, borrow from the peasants a
certain quantity of foodstuffs and raw materials by requisitioning—this was the plan (or method, system) that
we followed for more than three years, up to the spring of
1921. This was a revolutionary approach to the problem—to
break up the old social-economic system completely at one stroke
and to substitute a new one for it.

Since the spring of 1921, instead of this approach, plan,
method, or mode of action, we have been adopting (we have not
yet “adopted” but are still “adopting”, and have not yet fully realised it) a totally different method,
a reformist type of method: not to break up the old social economic system—trade, petty production, petty
proprietorship, capitalism—but to revive trade, petty proprietorship, capitalism, while cautiously and gradually
getting the upper hand over them, or making it possible to
subject them to state regulation only to the extent that they revive.

That is an entirely different approach to the problem.

Compared with the previous, revolutionary, approach, it is a
reformist approach (revolution is a change which breaks the old
order to its very foundations, and not one that cautiously,
slowly and gradually remodels it, taking care to break as little
as possible).

The question that arises is this. If, after trying revolutionary
methods, you find they have failed and adopt reformist methods,
does it not prove that you are declaring the revolution to have
been a mistake in general? Does it not prove that you should not
have started with the revolution but should have started with
reforms and confined yourselves to them?

That is the conclusion which the Mensheviks and others like them
have drawn. But this conclusion is either sophistry, a mere
fraud perpetrated by case-hardened politicians, or it is the
childishness of political tyros. The greatest, perhaps the only
danger to the genuine revolutionary is that of exaggerated
revolutionism, ignoring the limits and conditions in which
revolutionary methods are appropriate and can be successfully
employed. True revolutionaries have mostly come a cropper when
they began to write “revolution” with a capital R, to elevate “revolution” to something almost divine,
to lose their heads, to lose the ability to reflect, weigh and
ascertain in the coolest and most dispassionate manner at what
moment, under what circumstances and in which sphere of action
you must act in a revolutionary manner, and at what moment,
under what circumstances and in which sphere you must turn to
reformist action. True revolutionaries will perish (not that
they will be defeated from outside, but that their work will
suffer internal collapse) only if they abandon their sober
outlook and take it into their heads that the “great, victorious, world” revolution can and must solve all
problems in a revolutionary manner under all circumstances and
in all spheres of action. If they do this, their doom is
certain.

Whoever gets such ideas into his head is lost because he has
foolish ideas about a fundamental problem; and in a fierce war
(and revolution is the fiercest sort of war) the penalty for
folly is defeat.

What grounds are there for assuming that the “great, victorious, world” revolution can and must employ only
revolutionary methods? There are none at all. The assumption is
a pure fallacy; this can be proved by purely theoretical
propositions if we stick to Marxism. The experience of our
revolution also shows that it is a fallacy. From the theoretical point of view—foolish things are done in
time of revolution just as at any other time, said Engels, [2] and he was right. We must try to do
as few foolish things as possible, and rectify those that are
done as quickly as possible, and we must, as soberly as we can,
estimate which problems can be solved by revolutionary methods
at any given time and which cannot. From the point of view of
our practical experience the Brest peace was an example of
action that was not revolutionary at all; it was reformist, and
even worse, because it was a retreat, whereas, as a general
rule, reformist action advances slowly, cautiously, gradually,
and does not move backward. The proof that our tactics in
concluding the Brest peace were correct is now so complete, so
obvious to all and generally admitted, that there is no need to
say any more about it.

Our revolution has completed only its bourgeois-democratic work;
and we have every right to be proud of this. The proletarian or
socialist part of its work may be summed up in three main
points: (1) The revolutionary withdrawal from the imperialist
world war; the exposure and halting of the slaughter organised by the two world groups of capitalist
predators—for our part we have done this in full; others
could have done it only if there had been a revolution in a
number of advanced countries. (2) The establishment of the
Soviet system, as a form of the dictatorship of the proletariat. An epoch-making change has been made. The era of
bourgeois-democratic parliamentarism has come to an end. A new
chapter in world history—the era of proletarian dictatorship—has been opened. The Soviet system and all
forms of proletarian dictatorship will have the finishing
touches put to them and be completed only by the efforts of a
number of countries. There is still a great deal we have not
done in this field. It would be unpardonable to lose sight of
this. Again and again we shall have to improve the work, redo
it, start from the beginning. Every step onward and upward that
we take in developing our productive forces and our culture must
be accompanied by the work of improving and altering our Soviet
system—we are still low in the scale of economics and culture. Much will have to be altered, and to be
“embarrassed” by this would be absurd (if not worse). (3) The creation of the economic basis of the socialist
system; the main features of what is most important, most
fundamental, have not yet been completed. This, however, is our
soundest basis, soundest from the point of view of principle and
from the practical point of view, from the point of view of the
R.S.F.S.R. today and from the international point of view.

Since the main features of this basis have not yet been
completed we must concentrate all our attention upon it. The
difficulty here lies in the form of the transition.

In April 1918, in my Immediate The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government , I wrote:

“It is not enough to be a revolutionary and an adherent of
socialism or a Communist in general. You must be able at each
particular moment to find the particular link in the chain which
you must grasp with all your might in order to hold the whole
chain and to prepare firmly for the transition to the next link;
the order of the links, their form, the manner in which they are
linked together, their difference from each other in the
historical chain of events are not as simple and not as
senseless as those in an ordinary chain made by a smith.”

At the present time, in the sphere of activity with which we are
dealing, this link is the revival of home trade under proper state regulation (direction). Trade is the
“link” in the historical chain of events, in the transitional forms of our socialist construction in 1921-22,
which we, the proletarian government, we, the ruling Communist
Party, “ must grasp with all our might ”.
If we “grasp” this link firmly enough now we shall certainly control the whole chain in the very
near future. If we do not, we shall not control the whole chain,
we shall not create the foundation for socialist social and
economic relations.

Communism and trade?! It sounds strange. The two seem to be
unconnected, incongruous, poles apart. But if we study it from
the point of view of economics , we shall find that the
one is no more remote from the other than communism is from
small-peasant, patriarchal farming.

When we are victorious on a world scale I think we shall use
gold for the purpose of building public lavatories in the
streets of some of the largest cities of the world. This would
be the most “just” and most educational way of utilising gold for the benefit of these generations which have
not forgotten how, for the sake of gold, ten million men were
killed and thirty million maimed in the “great war for freedom”, the war of 1914-18, the war that was waged to
decide the great question of which peace was the worst, that of
Brest or that of Versailles; and how, for the sake of this same
gold, they certainly intend to kill twenty million men and to
maim sixty million in a war, say, in 1925, or 1928, between,
say, Japan and the U.S.A., or between Britain and the U.S.A., or
something like that.

But however “just”, useful, or humane it would be to utilise gold for this purpose, we nevertheless say that we
must work for another decade or two with the same intensity and
with the same success as in the 1917-21 period, only in a much
wider field, in order to reach this state. Meanwhile, we must
save the gold in the R.S.F.S.R., sell it at the highest price,
buy goods with it at the lowest price. When you live among
wolves, you must howl like a wolf, while as for exterminating
all the wolves, as should be done in a rational human society,
we shall act up to the wise Russian proverb: “Boast not
before but after the battle”.

Trade is the only possible economic link between the scores of
millions of small farmers and large-scale industry if . . . if there is not alongside these farmers an
excellently equipped large-scale machine industry with a network
of power transmission lines, an industry whose technical
equipment, organisational “superstructures” and other features are sufficient to enable it to supply the small
farmers with the best goods in larger quantities, more quickly
and more cheaply than before. On a world scale this “if” has already been achieved , this
condition already exists. But the country, formerly one of the
most backward capitalist countries, which tried alone directly
and at one stroke to create, to put into use, to organise
practically the new links between industry and agriculture, failed to achieve this task by “direct
assault”, and must now try to achieve it by a number of
slow, gradual, and cautious “siege” operations.

The proletarian government can control trade, direct it into
definite channels, keep it within certain limits. I shall give a
small, a very small example. In the Donets Basin a slight, still
very slight, but undoubted revival in the economy has commenced,
partly due to a rise in the productivity of labour at the large
state mines, and partly due to the leasing of small mines to
peasants. As a result, the proletarian government is receiving a
small additional quantity (a miserably small quantity compared
with what is obtained in the advanced countries, but an
appreciable quantity considering our poverty-stricken condition)
of coal at a cost of, say, 100; and it is selling this coal to
various government departments at a price of, say, 120, and to
private individuals at a price of, say, 140. (I must say in
parenthesis that my figures are quite arbitrary, first because I
do not know the exact figures, and, secondly, I would not now
make them public even if I did.) This looks as if we are
beginning , if only in very modest dimensions, to control exchange between industry and agriculture, to
control wholesale trade, to cope with the task of taking in hand
the available, small, backward industry, or large-scale but
weakened and ruined industry; of reviving trade on the present economic basis; of making the ordinary middle
peasant (and that is the typical peasant, the peasant in the
mass, the true representative of the petty-bourgeois milieu)
feel the benefit of the economic revival; of taking advantage of
it for the purpose of more systematically and persistently, more
widely and successfully restoring large-scale industry.

We shall not surrender to “sentimental socialism”, or to the old Russian, semi-aristocratic, semi-muzhik and
patriarchal mood, with their supreme contempt for trade. We can
use, and, since it is necessary, we must learn to use, all transitional economic forms for the purpose of strengthening
the link between the peasantry and the proletariat, for the
purpose of immediately reviving the economy of our ruined and
tormented country, of improving industry, and facilitating such
future, more extensive and more deep-going, measures as
electrification.

Marxism alone has precisely and correctly defined the relation
of reforms to revolution, although Marx was able to see this
relation only from one aspect—under the conditions preceding the first to any extent permanent and lasting victory
of the proletariat, if only in one country. Under those
conditions, the basis of the proper relation was that reforms
are a by-product of the revolutionary class struggle of the
proletariat. Throughout the capitalist world this relation is
the foundation of the revolutionary tactics of the proletariat—the ABC, which is being distorted and obscured
by the corrupt leaders of the Second International and the
half-pedantic and half-finicky knights of the Two-and-a-Half
International. After the victory of the proletariat, if only in
one country, something new enters into the relation between
reforms and revolution. In principle, it is the same as before,
but a change in form takes place, which Marx himself could not
foresee, but which can be appreciated only on the basis of the
philosophy and politics of Marxism. Why were we able to carry
out the Brest retreat successfully? Because we had advanced so
far that we had room in which to retreat. At such dizzy speed,
in a few weeks, from October 25, 1917, to the Brest peace, we
built up the Soviet state, withdrew from the imperialist war in
a revolutionary manner and completed the bourgeois-democratic
revolution so that even the great backward movement (the Brest
peace) left us sufficient room in which to take advantage of the
“respite” and to march forward victoriously against
Kolchak, Denikin, Yudenich, Pilsudski and Wrangel.

Before the victory of the proletariat, reforms are a by product
of the revolutionary class struggle. After the victory (while
still remaining a “by-product” on an international scale) they are, in addition, for the country in which victory
has been achieved, a necessary and legitimate breathing space
when, after the utmost exertion of effort, it becomes obvious
that sufficient strength is lacking for the revolutionary
accomplishment of some transition or another. Victory creates
such a “reserve of strength” that it is possible to hold out even in a forced retreat, hold out both materially and
morally. Holding out materially means preserving a sufficient
superiority of forces to prevent the enemy from inflicting utter
defeat. Holding out morally means not allowing oneself to become
demoralised and disorganised, keeping a sober view of the
situation, preserving vigour and firmness of spirit, even
retreating a long way, but not too far, and in such a way as to
stop the retreat in time and revert to the offensive.

We retreated to state capitalism, but we did not retreat too
far. We are now retreating to the state regulation of trade, but
we shall not retreat too far. There are visible signs that the
retreat is coming to an end; there are signs that we shall be
able to stop this retreat in the not too distant future. The
more conscious, the more unanimous, the more free from prejudice
we are in carrying out this necessary retreat, the sooner shall
we be able to stop it, and the more lasting, speedy and
extensive will be our subsequent victorious advance.

November 5, 1921