V. I. Lenin

Source: ru:PSS/v53;es:MT
Translated: machine translation (DeepSeek) from the Russian; AI-translated.

TO THE FISHERMEN AND WORKERS OF THE NORTHERN COAST

To the Working-Class Comrades, Fishermen of the Aral Sea

Dear Comrades,

You must have already heard of the great disaster—the unprecedented famine that has struck the entire Volga area and part of the Urals region. From Astrakhan Gubernia to the Tatar Republic and Perm Gubernia, the drought has almost completely burnt out both grain and grass. Millions of people—working peasants and workers—and millions of head of cattle are on the verge of perishing, and are already perishing.

Russians and Moslems, settled and nomadic—all alike face a cruel death unless help comes from their comrades—workers, working peasants, herdsmen and fishermen from the more fortunate areas. Of course, the Soviet Government, for its part, is hastening to the aid of the famine-stricken; it has already sent them, as an urgent measure, over 12,000,000 poods of grain for winter sowing, and is now dispatching food, organising public canteens, etc. But all this is not enough. The disaster is so great, the Soviet Republic has been so ruined by the tsarist war and the Whiteguards, that with state resources we can barely feed one-quarter of the needy until the next harvest.

Nor can we count on the help of the rich capitalists. The capitalists who now govern the strongest states in the world—Britain, America, France—have, it is true, declared that they, too, want to help our starving peasants, but on conditions that would mean handing over to them all power over our Workers’ and Peasants’ Republic. That is understandable. When was it ever known for a bloodsucker of the working man, a capitalist and usurer, to help him disinterestedly? The capitalist class has always used the famine of the working man to enslave him body and soul. And they want to take advantage of our famine to destroy our freedom, won with our blood, to wrest power forever from the hands of the workers and peasants, and to set over them again the tsar, the landlord, the boss, the police officer and the official.

The only hope of the starving people of Kazan, Ufa, Samara and Astrakhan is the great proletarian solidarity of working people like themselves, with horny hands, who earn their living by the sweat of their brow and suck nobody’s blood. You in the Aral Sea area have a good catch of fish and will get through without great hardship. Spare some of your catch for the old men and women who are swollen with hunger, for the eight million exhausted toilers who, with empty stomachs, will have to do all the heavy work of tilling the soil for almost a whole year, and, lastly, for the seven million children, who are the first to be threatened with death.

Give generously, dear comrades, fishermen and workers of the Aral Sea! You will be doing not only a humane deed, but you will also strengthen the cause of the working-class revolution.

For you will show the whole world, and above all the working people, that the power of the workers’ Soviet state, built on the broadest mutual aid of the proletarians of the most remote areas, is invincible.

Let the entire working class rise as one man to heal the grievous wound of the Volga area, and the fertile Volga area will repay us in future years with its grain. Only in this way shall we preserve the Soviet power and defend our won freedom against all the villainous attacks of the capitalists of the whole world.

Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars
V. Ulyanov (Lenin)

---

Written on October 7, 1921
First published in 1942
in Lenin Miscellany XXXIV
Printed from the typewritten
text signed by
V. I. Lenin