Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested.—V.I.Lenin
I.L.W.P. BULLETIN
Weekly newspaper of the International Leninist Workers Party (P&P Bulletin Publications, PO Box 50, London SW17 9NL)((GPO Regd.)   
No 675 Tuesday November 17 1992                                                                                                             10p 

Iraqgate crooks will need more than dirty trade-war in arms to save their rotten economy

In breaking their own laws against selling weapons to Saddam Hussein and then organising a cover-up to save ministers' skins and let ordinary businessmen face imprisonment, the Tory government have reached the bottom of the capitalist cess pit.

"If we don't breach the regulations and supply Iraq with arms and arms-making equipment, then some other Western 'free world' country will get in and do it before us, and we will have lost valuable trade" was the constant refrain of all the secret documents which the establishment tried to keep out of court.

The trial of BSA and Matrix Churchill executives collapsed in time to avoid jail tyranny for these agents of government policy, but earlier court cases did end in prison sentences for the private-enterprise gun runners acting with Cabinet approval.

In those hearings, the censorship attempt through public interest immunity certificates was successful, and the Tory business agents were denied the state documents they needed to prove that their illegal arms trading in fact went ahead with government connivance.

The Heseltine pretence that he only signed the ban on use of his department's secret trade documents once he was certain that the judge would override the censorship if it was really in the defendants' interests, is a double fraud.

Firstly, why not simply act positively to stop the unfair trial since it was only another government department (Customs and Excise) which was bringing the prosecution for breach of trade regulations?

Secondly, why were British businessmen already sentenced for similar offences, but who had been denied the government's secret evidence of Cabinet connivance with the arms trade to Iraq, with which to prove their own 'innocence'?

By definition, every statement ever uttered by the bourgeois-idealist philosophy of monopoly-imperialism is totally suspect. But this decadent regime is now lying through its teeth with every single word it pronounces, - such is the panic-ridden depth of its crisis.

The sordid arms-trade grubbing and the GATT confrontation sum up the burdens on British imperialism in the international economic mayhem, and the Chancellor's feeble autumn statement underlines the chronic domestic weaknesses.

Armaments barons have always been the classic target for leftwing critics of the market-forces system, but the issue of profiteering, still prevailing as the trade cycle reaches its destructive phase (throwing 'surplus' capital and labour on the scrapheap), will now roar back into public consciousness as never before in history.

Exploiting the senseless slaughter of the 10-year Iran-Iraq Gulf war (which was provoked and kept going by US imperialism in the first place as a strategy against the spread of Khomeini moslem fundamentalism) in order to rescue the British imperialist balance-of-payments deficits, came just as the UK was starting to lose its place in the monopoly-capitalist pecking order more rapidly and surely than ever.

These humiliating revelations are coming out now because of the subsequent splits in the ranks of Tory ruling-class self-confidence as nothing but recriminations about economic failure begin to be heard.

And as fast as some of the more extreme Rule Britannia circles mutter: "Of course sell the arms to whoever can pay for them,-before the Yanks, Frogs, or Krauts get in", far more significant sectors of public opinion will begin painfully drawing some appalled conclusions about the total corruption of the free market.

Disturbed feelings about the Iraqgate scandal and vicious cover-up come not accidentally just at the time when the autumn statement misery and the terrifying prospects of inter-imperialist trade war are dealing shattering blows to petty-bourgeois self-confidence.

The smug philistine complacency of 'free world' philosophy is in tatters.

Normally, such dirty rackets as the secret illegal arms trade to the aggressive nationalist Saddam Hussein would come to light so routinely and so unspectacularly through the fug of yuppie self-satisfaction that the ministers responsible could expect to get away quickly with just a mild reprimand or even a cosmetic promotion to the Lords or somewhere in order to get the affair quietly buried.

At a time of deep capitalist crisis when everything seems to be going wrong (and in fact is going wrong), doubts and disquiet about such murky goings-on tend to linger, or even escalate into a major political catastrophe.

The news from the international trade-war front and the domestic economic front could not be more demoralising for the already-shell-shocked Tory ranks.

As even the capitalist press is having to admit, British imperialism is in a more vulnerable position than ever in its history, to fight a serious trade war:

For the most important revelation of the Autumn Statement was the detail over how the recession has so eroded the tax base that public borrowing is set to explode upwards. Together with the exhaustion of privatisation proceeds as a significant contributor to the Government’s finances, it is clear that the public sector borrowing requirement is going to climb towards 9 or 10 per cent of GDP or more than £60 billion by 1994/5 — and any fall thereafter is dependent upon a full-blooded recovery.

But we cannot have a strong recovery because it will prompt such an enormous trade deficit that interest rates will have to rise to choke it off — notwithstanding the benign impact of devaluation. In other words the economy has reached a strategic cul-de-sac; and the Government will face some agonising choices.

The first is that taxation is going to have to rise substantially, perhaps reversing all the reductions of the last decade; the second is that the public sector pay policy will have to continue for a second and third year, which will only be possible in terms of a larger pay policy; and the third is that the Government will have to give up its fight against inflation — because renewed inflation is an essential component of unwinding the crisis and absolutely inevitable in any case. But most importantly of all the debate will move on from the question of recovery to Britain’s future as an industrial nation. It is an argument the Conservatives cannot win.

In these circumstances it is now questionable whether a party whose standing is going to plumb new depths, which must engage in so many policy reversals and which will be plagued by internal divisions, can sustain its position as the supreme force in British politics. The coalition that Mr Major inherited from Mrs Thatcher, ranging from C2s through small businessmen to long standing Tory grandees, is already fracturing; but can it survive the pressures of the next few years? Conservative England is wilting before our eyes.

The breakdown is set to collide with public deficits that the computer simulations suggest will be of the order of £60 billion or more. Both Goldman Sachs and Salomon Brothers project a PSBR ex privatisation proceeds of £63.5 billion in 1994/95 rising still further in 1995/96. And that assumes the Government attains its tight spending targets and growth resumes at trend rates in 1994. Otherwise the PSBR will be even higher.

Who is going to buy this debt? Britain generates insufficient savings flows of its own, even if every penny was spent buying government bonds; nor can it look to foreigners, who will be cautious about buying sterling assets that will depreciate in value if the pound falls. If the Government does not want to drive up interest rates again it has two options; either raising taxes or, like the Russian and some South American governments, simply printing money.

The answer is that it will do some of both. Britain is under-taxed to the tune of £15 to £20 billion, and over the next two or three years taxation will rise. Even the standard rate may have to go up; unless the Government is prepared to see a VAT rate of 25 per cent and the base extended dramatically, no totem is sacrosanct.

It will also drop the rule that every pound of borrowing must be financed by selling bonds (the full funding rule). It will be compelled to issue short-term government IOUs — Treasury Bills (in effect printing money because the banks count Treasury Bills as if they were banknotes) — to fund its deficit. But, combine billions of extra bank deposits with low interest rates and a low exchange rate, and all the monetary conditions for an inflationary acceleration are in place: one more U-turn to heap on all the others.

Just as terrifying as the enormous debt and inflationary crises brewing is the disturbing spectre of permanent mass unemployment at more than 4 million of the population (the figure now, - shorn of government statistical massage) which the savage deflationary balance of the statement is only going to make much worse.

Setting public sector pay below the level of price rises for more than 5 million breadwinners is going to mean a further huge twist in the downward slump spiral.

Unemployment will continue to soar, thus further deflating the economy by more wage-bill cuts and more, wage-cutting pressures, and this in turn will cause government borrowing or money-printing to escalate even more dangerously.

Now it only needs more markets to crash such as the stock exchange, or sterling again, for British imperialism to be staring such humiliating disaster in the face as to raise serious questions about its early overthrow as revolutionary consciousness steadily begins to rise.

A trade-war catastrophe for the entire Western world, - inevitable soon, - would help put the seal on the British bourgeoisie's misery, not to mention the rest of imperialism.

First there would be a shattering psychological shock to the shallow free-market opportunism which has walled millions of workers off from rational politics for nearly 45 years since the end of World War II.

It is hard to describe just how different the struggle for philosophy and a world view is going to be once the ludicrous certainty that "they'll find a way to sort things out" turns to ashes in everyone's mouth.

Secondly, a majority of shallow public opinion will obviously initially rally round the chauvinist trade-war flag, but British imperialism earlier than most great-power rivals is likely to run into economic, diplomatic, political, or military defeats which will soon begin to shatter confidence which this middle-class nationalist mentality tries to preserve in the big bourgeoisie.

Thirdly, the antagonistic conflict of world trade war is going to be costly in any case for everyone on earth and for every country. Philosophically, the entire balance of pressure on the opinion of world society will have switched from being receptive to anti-communism to being automatically anti-imperialist.

The capitalist press itself has always admitted in the fine print that the imperialist-dominated international trading system is already an exploitation nightmare for the poorer countries, leading only to ever greater imbalances of wealth and opportunity which fuel growing anti-colonialist hatred in the Third World as the rich get ever richer and the less well-off fall ever further behind, - and at times leading towards absolute poverty. And this is even before a trade-war crisis starts to strike at every country's wellbeing:

Poised to take advantage of the new free trade world which will encourage coffee and other crops to be grown more efficiently, intensively and cheaply, the spectre of US, Japanese or EC agribusinesses today haunts the developing world like a modern version of the slave traders.

The world’s poor, the four billion who share roughly 20 per cent of the wealth and 15 per cent of world trade, are caught both ways in the Gatt proposals to liberalise world trade.

While it may offer developing countries such as Peru the best theoretical way out of their poverty/debt crisis and a way for a few industries to break into global markets, the Gatt leaves most countries staring into a cultural and environmental abyss, albeit one which may show up on the balance sheets as an increase in GDP.

FOR Jose Rivera Campoverde, small coffee farmer high in the remote eastern Andes of Peru, the drama of the world trade talks on the other side of the globe is anything but academic.

He may not understand the Gatt’s arcane language — who does? — but like millions of small farmers around the world, Campoverde knows the price he gets for his crop, dictated ultimately by the world commodity markets, gets lower each year. A decade ago he could keep his family well. Today, he just about makes out.

Tomorrow? Who knows? If the Uruguay Round of the Gatt goes through — and it’s odds-on that the EC and US powerbrokers will eventually stitch up a deal — it’s not hard to predict that he will eventually be priced out of the market by larger interests elsewhere.

For Campoverde, the options if his coffee prices fall much further are grim — to eke a living out of the maize and other vegetables that his land can support but which he cannot sell beyond his village because of its remoteness, or to take his chances in the shanty towns outside Peru’s cities.
The successful outcome of the reconvened Uruguay Round is being toted hard by the rich as economic manna for grim times; "$200 billion will flood into the world economy" (Times); "every family in Britain stands to gain up to £24 a week" (BBC); "it is the way out of recession" (Independent). The alternative — a collapse of the Gatt system of world trade — is scary. It would be "a headlong descent into economic Darwinism, rampant protectionism and trade wars," says Kevin Watkins, an Oxfam policy adviser.

For the poor, the Gatt system of rules to govern world trade offers the best defence against the unthinkable — total breakdown of the multilateral trading system which, for all its flaws, has brought some economic prosperity to the poorest since 1945.

But the new rules leave much to be desired; The Gatt has not addressed areas such as world debt or commodity prices, two of the most pressing problems developing countries face. "For the most part, the poor nations have been extras during the Gatt negotiations. While the show can’t go on without them, nobody is remotely interested in what they have to say", says Watkins. "The Uruguay Round has been largely dictated by powerful corporate interests in the US and EC, and the bargains are all struck between the major powers and their corporate advisers."

The quid pro quo of developing countries having greater access to world markets through a relaxation of the trade barriers put up by industrialised nations is that northern industries are given freedom to expand into protected areas, long denied them. Conditions regulating the investments and operations of mining, manufacturing and "service" industries such as transport, banking, and patents are to be eliminated or reduced.

It sounds a fair exchange, but it isn’t. The rich control the world’s investment and have the economic muscle to produce cheaper and faster goods. Teddy Goldsmith, editor of the Ecologist magazine, calls it the dawn of a "new colonialism", led by the world’s 500 largest transnational corporations which control 70 per cent of world trade. "The Third World is in a weak position to resist the new rules since it is poorly organised as a lobby group within Gatt," he says.
	
The implications of the Gatt for the poor have yet to be fully analysed but this much is clear. Third World nations will have to respect foreign patents (so leading to higher prices for technology, drugs and the like); will be unable to protect scarce resources if this constitutes a restraint on trade; and will be powerless to prevent cheap imports distorting their markets.

"The Gatt calls for limits on countries’ rights to control imports, based on the ideological belief that it is better for a nation to buy its food security on the world market than build up the capacity of its own farmers," says Mark Ritchie of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy in Minneapolis. "This is a great idea if you are a shareholder or employee of a multinational grain corporation but not much use if you are a farmer or city dweller in a poor country with little or no foreign exchange to buy imported foods." 

The resultant undermining of the livelihoods of farmers in many developing countries, where indigenous agriculture is small-scale, under-financed and unable to compete with imports, is detrimental on every count. At its worst, economic dependence is built on rich nations, indigenous populations are forced off the land into burgeoning cities, and the land is profitable only for agribusiness with its high-energy, destructive practices.

Soon, even the joke of  'free' trade will be no more. The cut-throat exploitative hatreds of the whole of the capitalist system will be the plain and only reality.

The chauvinistic nastiness is already running away with the petty-bourgeoisie, with capitalist press comments building trade-war barriers higher with every new sneer embroidered from scraps of 'official' venom:

JOHN MAJOR effectively ordered the French president to keep his nose out of British affairs yesterday, when he wrote telling him that the timing of Britain’s ratification of the Maastricht treaty was a matter for the British Parliament alone.

Mr Major said French criticism was a diversion designed to distract attention from the more important issue of French objections to a deal over the Gatt trade talks.

A Downing Street statement made clear that the Edinburgh summit might see the European Council of Ministers accepting a Gatt deal by majority voting, regardless of French objections.

Downing Street suggested that the French referendum could have done far more damage to the ratification process than the British delay.

But the more enormous the crisis facing imperialism, the more wishful thinking there is, it seems, from bourgeois idealism seeking to play down the conflict, or else to verbally rubbish the other side before the fight has even begun, - as the British bourgeoisie has been doing against France over the GATT confrontation.

Maybe France is just blowing hard but will meekly sign a capitulation to US farming interests at the eleventh hour.

But even if that is so, it will only be a temporary postponement of inevitable clashes to come, because the demands of capitalist crisis insist that in a slump, 'surplus' capital is destroyed, - otherwise the rate of profit will never revive for all the participants in the cut-throat trade war.

Sooner or later, a major sector of monopoly—bourgeois imperialist interests is going to have to insist on a fight to the finish over its 'rights' to a place in the sun measuring up to its own expectations and not to those of a dominant rival laying the law down.

And once again, the fine print of the capitalist press's own coverage of the tortured GATT squabbling indicates that the crunch may have already arrived,- in farming interests at least:

FRANCE has stepped up the pressure against further concessions by the European Community at this week’s farm trade negotiations with the Americans, but has also put in train a scheme to soften the impact on its farmers of any agreement reached with Washington.

In an attempt to bolster the French case, French officials in the European Commission have leaked figures showing that the deal discussed two weeks ago in Chicago would have imposed much tougher curbs on farm production than those provided for in the reform of the Common Agricultural Policy earlier this year.

On Friday the French farm minister, Jean-Pierre Soisson, said a deal which exceeded the CAP reforms would never be sanctioned by France.

The figures contradict repeated assurances by the commissioner for agriculture, Ray MacSharry, that he would not agree to anything that went further than CAP reform.

The leaked papers show the vigour with which the British government is pushing for a Gatt agreement. According to the documents, John Major telephoned Mr Gummer in Chicago and asked him to put pressure on Mr MacSharry to reach a deal with the US.

French officials believe that Britain would be happy to see a Gatt deal that brought about a further reform of the CAP, which is often criticised in Britain as costly and wasteful.

According to the leaked figures, Mr MacSharry is basing his negotiating stance on over-optimistic assumptions about the cuts in production that the CAP reform will bring about.

And agriculture is only the start of all the imperialist system's problems.

There is already a further undeclared trade-war in currency values and interest rates whereby the internal financial policies of the more powerful countries like Germany are partly geared with an eye to what help or damage they may do to the economies of rival imperialist countries.

And those monetary disagreements and accusations are in turn only a reflection of the fight-to-the-death for finance-capital domination worldwide via ownership of the biggest banks controlling international indebtedness policy.

It is in this field that some of the most far-reaching and long-lasting damage will be done to each other by the imperialist rivals. In the end, banking dominance should mean world dominance, and the postwar pattern has been towards a relentless pursuit of the initial American imperialist lead after 1945 by Germany and Japan.

The entire basis of the absolute turmoil which has fallen upon 'free-world' relations in the past few years has been because Germany and Japan had begum to overtake the USA in world banking, and had won much matching industrial, scientific and technological supremacy at the same time into the bargain.

Even if a last-minute patched up compromise over farming products is stuck together at the end of the US ultimatum period, there still stretches ahead an almost unbroken vista of trade-war issue in commodity after commodity, and interest-area after interest-area, etc.

Japan has largely kept out of the frontline trade-war crisis for the moment, but if the domestic political turmoil in Japan is as much an indication of total economic and trade problems to come as it is in Britain, then Japanese imperialism will have more than its fair share of difficulties before much longer:

SHIN KANEMARU, the recently disgraced "godfather" of Japan’s ruling party, tried to pay a criminal gang to silence rightwing critics of a political ally in 1987, according to documents released in court yesterday.

The allegations came as the prime minister, Kiichi Miyazawa, faced a second day of questioning in parliament on another money and mobster scandal.

The complicated claims in the Tokyo district court arise from Noboru Takeshita’s campaign to become prime minister in 1987. Mr Takeshita, founder of the biggest faction within the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, was being harassed by rightwing extremists using loudspeaker vans to blare out offensive slogans, day and night, outside his office and home.

It was alleged in court that Mr Kanemaru and six other senior party figures offered sums of 5 billion yen (£28 million) to try to enlist the support of the Inagawakai criminal gang to silence the critics.

Only one of the seven men named admitted having met any of the alleged criminal or rightwing leaders. Through a spokesman, Mr Kanemaru claimed to have no knowledge of the incident.

What is known is that the rightwingers did stop their shouting match against Mr Takeshita and that he was chosen as prime minister in 1987. He lasted for two years before he was brought down by another bribes-for-favours scandal.

In the Diet (parliament) Mr Miyazawa was questioned about another scandal in which Mr Kanemaru admitted receiving an illegal "gift" of 500 million yen from a controversial businessman. The name of the same businessman was mentioned yesterday in the court as a go-between in the negotiations to get the loudspeakers silenced.

The prime minister repeated his call for the need to recapture public trust in politics and politicians. But he refused to criticise the 200,000 yen (£1,040) fine Mr Kanemaru received for his offence, the same amount as for some traffic infringements.

"The prosecutors fulfilled their duty to the best of their ability," Mr Miyazawa said.
Makoto Tanabe, leader of the largest opposition party, declared: "We have no choice but to take action to demand the ousting of the Miyazawa cabinet."

And Koshiro Ishida, chairman of the Komeito (Clean Government Party) said: "We are now at the crossroads of whether we can make our nation’s politics truly democratic or we will wind up seeing its collapse."

Nothing now works for capitalism. Even its most outstanding examples of economic success reveal just as much corruption and misery as the more decrepit also-rans like British imperialism, now finally on its last legs after more than 300 years of international dominance.

A trade war could hit previous triumphal centres of imperialist excellence like Germany and Japan even faster and more devastatingly than lamer rivals like Britain and the USA, - being relatively much more dependent on foreign trade for full employment because of having won such a large slice of it earlier by being so commercially predatory.

Every part of the imperialist world will sooner or later face revolutionary upheaval from working masses who find the ultimate slump-warmongering expression of capitalism's basic exploitative domineering nastiness too intolerable. Build Leninism. Spread the ILWP Bulletin. Joe Harper

A correct world view is crucial to human progress

Further to the polemic against the ex-WRP Torrance Trots (Bulletin 674), it is interesting to note some of Lenin's own comments on "what made the Russian Revolution".

The fake-'lefts' gave a mechanistic statement of the obvious: 

"the conflict between the productive forces and the productive relations was driven to its sharpest point of transformation", 

and a sly half-truth about 

"there being in Russia a Bolshevik Party dominated by the dialectical-materialist approach" 

— but nothing about the actual political leadership by Lenin and his lifelong Bolshevik colleagues.

The Trots want to avoid the reality that Trotsky had been a lifelong opponent of Lenin and the Bolshevik Party policies - advocating his own group's Menshsevik/Mezhrayontsy views which Lenin polemically slaughtered (see Lenin v Trotsky. Pioneer 1972 492 pp, shortly to be serialised in the Bulletin).

By stressing the "dialectical materialist approach", the Torranceites can pretend that Trotsky was always at one with Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

This is a total historical falsification. Dozens of wretched reformist and revisionist groups including all the renegades of the Second International all continued pretending to be 'dialectical materialist' or Marxist in their approach despite having all capitulated to social chauvinism in supporting their own ruling classes in World War 1.

The only science of society is the one that works, which analyses the historical movements of class forces correctly and acts accordingly to lead the socialist revolution.

Only Lenin's policies achieved this, in the teeth of hostile back-stabbing opposition from these scores of so-called dialectical materialist approach groups, including Trotsky who organised total hostility to Leninist policies from 1903 to 1917.

Only 10 weeks before the October Revolution did the opportunist Trotsky totally accept in practice that Leninism had been correct all along - and Trotskyism hopelessly wrong - and creep into the Bolshevik Party, - naturally without a word of regret, apology, or humble pie for having tried to get the proletariat to oppose Leninism for the crucial 14 years between 1903 and 1917.

By avoiding the vital question of leadership in their childish gibberish about "what made the Russian Revolution", the Trots hope to avoid the essence of dialectical materialist science, - its precise analysis and programme, provably correct only in practice.

Life proved Leninism to be the science of modern Marxism, and nothing else was. It was the specifically correct Bolshevik policies which "made the Russian Revolution". Without correct theory, there can be no correct revolutionary practice. Lenin explains in these passages that being correct about the world developments was the key to Soviet revolutionary survival.

And he adds that being correct meant that the Soviet revolution gained crucial sympathy from enough of the world proletariat to make intervention versus the Soviet Union not a guaranteed success for imperialism.

It is fascinating to note that even in spite of the terrible revisionist mistakes by the Stalin leadership in the 1920s and 1930s, and despite the monstrous anti-communist hysterical propaganda that had been unleashed worldwide against the Soviet Union during this period, this popular sympathy for the USSR still remained intact when German imperialism carried out the West's wishes in 1941 in invading the Soviet workers state. The whole world thrilled as the Red Army smashed the Nazi war machine.

Even after the even worse revisionist nonsenses of the postwar period, it is still certain that basic Soviet state policy was still sufficiently correct to guarantee that even in the 1980s, world opinion would have been more sympathetic to the Soviet workers state than to any invading imperialist army, in spite of the even more massive anti-communist hysteria that had been built up by this time.

The great eventual weakness of the Soviet Union was precisely the misanalysis of world developments committed by Stalinist revisionism in defeatistly capitulating to class-collaborating gibberish.

This pretended that world imperialism would be overcome by the Soviet workers state simply convincing the West to go communist by economic example. This rot meant that the non-stop sabotage and economic embargoes against the socialist camp had become the decisive arbiter of world development, not the Marxist-Leninist science of unavoidable revolutionary crisis within the capitalist system of slump and war. It meant that the temporary philistine glitz of a monstrously unbalanced and unjust imperialist boom was set up as the symbol of what was the best future for mankind, not the objective humanitarian science of communism.

It was Stalinism's misanalysis of world developments which finally failed to inspire and lead world opinion, - not the cumulative damage done by revisionist crimes and anti-communist hysteria. It was a failure of understanding which finally persuaded the degenerate Moscow bureaucracy to go the whole revisionist defeatist class-collaborating hog and liquidate themselves, not the strength of imperialist anti-communism or of hostile world opinion.

Ultimately it was by getting things incorrect about world developments, - the very opposite of Lenin's wisdom about the Bolshevik strength lying in getting a correct analysis of world developments - which brought down the Soviet workers state leadership.

There has been no failure of the Soviet workers state, or of the dictatorship of the proletariat, or of planned socialism, or of communism. There has only been a failure of scientific understanding by the last generation of the party and state bureaucracy.

Lenin goes on to make more correct points about the Soviet workers state alone having the potential for the right attitude towards national minorities - provided that they did not side with imperialist counter-revolution against the USSR (as some in fact later did in collaborating with Nazism in its 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union).

Despite some dubious revisionist mishandling of the national question at that time and both earlier and subsequently, it is interesting that the bureaucratically degenerate Soviet state leadership was still a far better umbrella for the nearly 200 nationalities of the USSR to shelter under even as late on as the Gorbachev philistine paralysis. The nauseating outbreak of chauvinistic strife has only broken out, - with catastrophic results to the national minorities and to every citizen of the former USSR, - since the depravity of 'market forces freedom' -meaning cut-throat competition and exploitation and greed - was thrust upon the Soviet workers state by the one-world class-collaborating idiocies of Gorbachev.

Correctly, Lenin observes that imperialism would be forced to trade and coexist with the Soviet workers state because of the West's own contradictions. So it proved, and so it would have remained, even though open trading relations with imperialist exploitation would never have been appropriate, and even though the West would always have continued being as economically difficult and as politically obnoxious as possible towards the socialist camp. There would never have been any need for Soviet liquidation on any grounds.

Its economy could have gone on developing the same steady way it has always done since 1917.

Lenin's speculative comments about the future of the state security organisation (the Cheka) are revealing. He states clearly that as long as imperialism lasts on earth, workers' power could not survive without a KGB (Cheka). And although Lenin talks about the dream of replacing Cheka authority with international trading relations and revolutionary legality, he makes it clear that such a programme would have been pedantry if constitutionalism had become the aim of Soviet state development rather than Cheka revolutionary authority at a time when the Soviet workers state was actively under imperialist attack or hostility.

But that circumstance never altered. The Soviet Union never ceased to be under the cosh of total imperialist subversive hostility and economic sabotage, not to mention ideological propaganda hysteria trying to wreck the USSR.

Lenin stresses that it will be when the Soviet workers state is closer to 'unshakable and lasting power' that these circumstances demanding a turn to legality and trade relations as the political authority rather than the might of the KGB, - will prevail. In other words, that time never arrived. But Gorbachevite revisionism virtually liquidated the KGB. And soon after virtually collapsed the whole of the Soviet Union. "As long as imperialism survives, workers power will not be able to survive with a strong state security authority" Lenin observed scientifically. A huge price has been paid for the philistine support given to revisionism in the past.

And Trotskyite ignorance on all these questions is no help either. Build Leninism. Spread the ILWP Bulletin Alf Lee

This is the first year that we have been able to enjoy a relative respite from attacks, even if for a limited period, and have been able in some measure to apply our energies to our chief and fundamental tasks, namely, the rehabilitation of our war-ravaged economy, healing the wounds inflicted on Russia by the exploiting classes that had been in power, and laying the foundations for socialist construction.

First and foremost, in dealing with the question of the international position of our Republic, I must repeat what I have already said, namely, that a certain equilibrium, though a highly unstable one, has been created in international relations. This is now evident. It is very strange for those of us who have lived through the revolution from its inception, who have experienced and observed our incredible difficulties in breaching the imperialist fronts, to see how things have now developed. At that time probably none of us expected or could have expected that things would shape out like this.

We imagined (and it is perhaps well worth remembering this now because it will help us in our practical conclusions on the main economic problems) that future development would take a more simple, a more direct form than the one it took. We told ourselves and we told the working class and all working people both of Russia and of other countries that there was no way out of the accursed, criminal imperialist slaughter except through revolution, and that by breaking off the imperialist war by revolution we were opening up the only possible way out of this criminal slaughter for all peoples. It seemed to us then, as it was bound to, that this was the obvious, direct and easiest path to take. This direct path, which, in fact, alone had enabled us to break free of imperialist ties, of imperialist crimes and of the imperialist war continuing to threaten the rest of the world, proved to be one which other nations were unable to take—at any rate not as quickly as we had thought they would. When, nevertheless, we now see what has taken place, when we see that there is only one Socialist Soviet Republic and that it is surrounded by a whole array of frenziedly hostile imperialist powers, we ask ourselves—how was it possible for this to happen?

One may reply without any exaggeration that this happened because our understanding of events was basically correct, our appraisal of the imperialist slaughter and the confusion in the relations between the imperialist powers was also basically correct. It is only due to this that such a strange situation, the unstable, inexplicable, and yet to a certain extent indisputable equilibrium that we witness, has arisen. The fact of the matter is that although completely surrounded by countries economically and militarily much more powerful than ourselves, whose open hostility to us quite often borders on frenzy, we nevertheless see that they were unable to destroy Soviet Russia directly and instantly—something on which they had been spending so much of their resources and their strength for three years. When we ask ourselves how this could have happened, how it could be that a state, undoubtedly one of the most backward and weakest, managed to repel the attacks of the openly hostile, most powerful countries in the world, when we try to examine this question, we see clearly that it was because we proved to be correct on the most fundamental issues. Our forecasts and calculations proved to be correct. It turned -out that although we did not receive the swift and direct support of the working people of the world that we had counted on, and which we had regarded as the basis of the whole of our policy, we did receive support of another kind, which was not direct or swift—the sympathy of the workers and peasants, the farm workers, throughout the world, even in the countries most hostile to us, the sympathy that was great enough to be the final and most decisive source, the decisive reason for the complete failure of all the attacks directed against us. This sympathy consolidated the alliance of the working people of all countries which we had proclaimed and which had been implemented within the borders of our Republic, and which had its effect on all countries. No matter how precarious this support may be, as long as capitalism exists in other countries (this we must of course see clearly and frankly acknowledge), we may say that it is something we can rely on. Because of this sympathy and support, the intervention, which we endured in the course of three years, which caused us incredible destruction and suffering, is, I will not say impossible—one has to be very cautious and circumspect here—but, at any rate, has been made far more difficult for our enemies to carry out. And this, in the final analysis, explains the situation now obtaining and which at first glance appears so strange and incomprehensible.

When we calmly weigh up the sympathy felt for Bolshevism and the socialist revolution, when we survey the international situation from the point of view of the balance of forces, irrespective of whether these forces favour a just or an unjust cause, whether they favour the exploiting class or the working people—we shall ignore this aspect and attempt an appraisal of the alignment of these forces on an international scale—then we shall see that they are grouped in a manner that basically confirms our predictions and calculations: that capitalism is disintegrating and that since the war, which ended first with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and subsequently with the Treaty of Versailles—and I don’t know which is worse—hatred and loathing for the war increase as time passes even in the countries which emerged as victors. And the farther we get from the war the clearer it becomes, not only to the working people, hut to an extremely large extent also to the bourgeoisie of the victor countries, that capitalism is disintegrating, that the world economic crisis has created an intolerable situation from which there is no escape, despite all the victories. That is why, while being immeasurably weaker economically, politically and militarily than all the other powers, we are at the same time stronger, because we are...aware of and correctly assess all that emerges and must emerge from this imperialist confusion, from this bloody tangle and from those contradictions (to take only the currency contradictions, I will not mention the others) in which they have become entangled and are becoming entangled still more deeply and from which they see no way out.

Today we see how the representatives of the most moderate bourgeoisie, who are definitely and without doubt far removed from socialist ideas, to say nothing of  "that awful Bolshevism", change their tune; this concerns even people like the famous writer Keynes, whose book has been translated into all languages, who took part in the Versailles negotiations, and who devoted himself heart and soul to helping the governments—even he, subsequently, has had to change his tune, to give it up, although he continues to curse socialism. I repeat, he does not mention, nor does he wish even to think about Bolshevism—but he tells the capitalist world: "What you are doing will lead you into a hopeless situation", and he even proposes something like the annulment of all debts.

That is excellent, gentlemen! You should have followed our example long ago.

Only a few days ago we read a short report in the newspapers to the effect that one of the most experienced, exceedingly skilful and astute leaders of a capitalist government, Lloyd George, is, it appears, beginning to propose a similar step; and that seemingly the U.S.A. wishes to reply by saying: "Sorry, but we want to be repaid in full." That being so, we say to ourselves that things are not going too well in these advanced and mighty states since they are discussing such a simple measure so many years after the war. This was one of the easiest things we did—it was nothing to some of the other difficulties we overcame. (Applause.) When we see the growing confusion on this question we say that we are not afraid of their propaganda; although we by no means forget either the dangers surrounding us or our economic and military weakness compared to any one of these states, who, jointly, quite openly and frequently express their hatred for us. Whenever we express somewhat different views as to whether the existence of landowners and capitalists is justified they do not like it, and these views are declared to be criminal propaganda.

We see, nevertheless, that a certain equilibrium has been created. This is the objective political situation, quite independent of our victories, which proves that we have fathomed the depth of the contradictions connected with the imperialist war, and that we are gauging them more correctly than ever before and more correctly than other powers, who, despite all their victories, despite all their strength, have not yet found a way out, nor see any. That is the substance of the international situation which accounts for what we now see. We have before us a highly unstable equilibrium but one that is, nevertheless, certain, obvious, indisputable. I do not know whether this is for long, and I do not think that anyone can know. That is why, for our part, we must display the utmost caution. And the first precept of our policy, the first lesson that emerges from our governmental activities for the past year, the lesson which must be learned by all workers and peasants, is to be on the alert, to remember that we are surrounded by people, classes, governments who openly express the utmost hatred for us. We must remember that we are always a hair’s breadth away from invasion. We shall do all in our power to prevent this misfortune. It is doubtful that any nation has experienced such a burden of the imperialist war as we have. Then we bore the burden of the Civil War forced on us by the ruling classes, who fought for the Russia of the émigrés, the Russia of the landowners, the Russia of the capitalists. We know, we know only too well, the incredible misfortunes that war brings to the workers and peasants. For that reason our attitude to this question must be most cautious and circumspect. We are ready to make the greatest concessions and sacrifices in order to preserve the peace for which we have paid such a high price. We are ready to make huge concessions and sacrifices, but not any kind and not for ever. Let those, fortunately not numerous, representatives of the war parties and aggressive cliques of Finland, Poland and Rumania who make great play of this—let them mark it well. (Applause.)

Anyone who has any political sense or acumen will say that there has not been—nor can there be—a government in Russia other than the Soviet Government prepared to make such concessions and sacrifices in relation to nationalities within our state, and also to those which had joined the Russian Empire. There is not, and cannot be, another government which would recognise as clearly as we do and declare so distinctly to one and all that the attitude of old Russia (tsarist Russia, Russia of the war parties) to the nationalities populating Russia was criminal, that this attitude was impermissible, that it aroused the rightful and indignant protest and discontent of the oppressed nationalities. There is not, and cannot be, another government which would so openly admit this, which would conduct this anti-chauvinist propaganda, a propaganda that recognises the guilt of old Russia, tsarist Russia, Kerensky Russia—a government which would conduct propaganda against the forcible incorporation of other nationalities into Russia. This is not mere words—this is an obvious political fact, absolutely indisputable and plain for all to see. As long as no nationalities engage in intrigues against us which bind them to the imperialist oppression, as long as they do not help to crush us, we shall not be deterred by formalities. We shall not forget that we are revolutionaries. (Applause.) But there are facts incontrovertibly and indisputably showing that in Russia, that has defeated the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, the smallest, completely unarmed nationality, however weak it may be, may and must absolutely rest assured that we have nothing but peaceful intentions towards it, that our propaganda about the criminality of the old policy of the old governments is not weakening, and that we are as firm as ever in our desire at all costs, and at the price of enormous sacrifices and concessions, to maintain peace with all nationalities that belonged to the former Russian Empire, but who did not wish to remain with us. We have proved this. And we shall prove this no matter how great the curses rained on us from all sides. It seems to us that we have given excellent proof of it, and we declare to the meeting of representatives of the workers and peasants of Russia, to the many millions of workers and peasants, that we shall do our utmost to preserve peace in the future, that we shall not shrink from great sacrifices and concessions in order to safeguard this peace.

There are, however, limits beyond which one cannot go. We shall not permit peace treaties to be flouted. We shall not permit attempts to interfere with our peaceful work. On no account shall we permit this, and we shall rise to a man to defend our existence. (Applause.)

All these capitalist countries are in a position to make us pay through the nose; we pay more for the goods than they are worth; but for all that, they are helping our economy. How did that happen? Why are they acting against their own inclinations and in contradiction to what they are constantly asserting in their press? And this press is more than a match for ours in respect of circulation, and the force and venom with which it attacks us. They call us criminals, and all the same they help us. And so it turns out they are bound up with us economically. It turns out as I have already said, that our calculations, made on a grand scale, are more correct than theirs. This is not because they lack people capable of making correct calculations—they have far more than we have—but because it is impossible to calculate properly when one is heading for destruction.

But for all that, it is a beginning. And we, who have experienced direct attempts to crush us, who for years have been hearing threats that everything will be done to prevent any relations with us as long as we remain what we are, nevertheless see that something has proved more potent than these throats. We see that their forecast of economic development was wrong and ours was right. We have made a start, and we must now exert all our efforts to continue this development without interruption. We must make it our primary concern, giving it all our attention.

You know what that calamity, the famine, cost us, what incredible difficulties it is still causing on the farms, in industry and in our life generally. But although our country has been devastated by war, has suffered tremendous hardship as a result of all the wars and of the rule of tsars and capitalists, we are now on the road that offers us a prospect of improvement, in spite of the unceasing hostility towards us. That is the main factor. That is why, when we read recently about the Washington Conference,41 when we heard the news that the countries hostile to us would be obliged to convene a second conference next summer and to invite Germany and Russia to discuss the terms of a genuine peace, we said that our terms are clear and definite; we have formulated them, we have published them. How much hostility shall we encounter? We have no illusions about that; but we know that the economic position of those who blockaded us has proved to be vulnerable. There is a force more powerful than the wishes, the will and the decisions of any of the governments or classes that are hostile to us. That force is world general economic relations, which compel them to make contact with us. The farther they proceed in this direction the more extensive and rapid will be the development of what in today’s report for 1921 I have been able to indicate to you only by some scanty figures.

It is only necessary to determine what the main thing was that united us most of all, that is more vital from the point of view of the most important and radical question of our entire revolution and of all future socialist revolutions (if viewed generally on a world scale).

The most basic, most vital question is that of the attitude of the working class to the peasants; this involves the alliance of the working class and the peasants; the ability of the advanced workers, who have passed through a lengthy, difficult but rewarding school of experience in a large factory, to do things in such a way that they attract to their side the mass of peasants, who were ground down by capitalism, by the landowners and by their old poverty-stricken, petty farms, to prove to them that only in alliance with the workers, no matter what the difficulties to be encountered on this path, and they are many, and we cannot close our eyes to this—only through this alliance can the peasants abolish the age-old oppression by the landowners and capitalists. Only by consolidating the alliance of the workers and peasants can mankind be saved from events such as the recent imperialist slaughter, from the barbarous contradictions to be seen in the capitalist world today, where a small number, a miserable handful of the richest powers are choking with wealth, while the huge population of the globe suffers privations, being unable to benefit from the culture and rich resources that lie before them but cannot be made use of because of insufficient commerce.

We speak of a flourishing large-scale industry, which is able to supply all the goods the peasants are in urgent need of, and this possibility exists; if we consider the problem on a world scale, we see that a flourishing large-scale industry capable of supplying the world with all kinds of goods exists, only its owners do not know how to use it for anything but the manufacture of guns, shells and other armaments, employed with such success from 1914 to 1918. Then industry was geared to war and supplied mankind with its products so abundantly that no fewer than 10 million people were killed and no fewer than 20 million maimed. This is something we have all seen, and, besides, war in the twentieth century is not like previous wars.

After this war, even among the victor countries, among those most hostile and alien to any kind of socialism, who ruthlessly oppose the slightest socialist idea, a large number of people have been heard to say quite definitely that even if there were no wicked Bolsheviks in the world, it is hardly likely that another war of this kind could be permitted. This is said by the representatives of the most wealthy countries. This is what this rich, advanced, large-scale industry was used for. It served to maim people, and it had no time to supply the peasants with its goods. All the same we have a right to say that such an industry exists on a world scale. There are countries whose large-scale industry is so advanced that it could instantly satisfy the needs of hundreds of millions of backward peasants. We make this the basis of our calculations.

At a time when the main attention and the main forces were diverted to political and military problems, we simply had to press forward with great speed along with the vanguard, knowing that it would have support. The alliance of the peasants and workers in the fight for great political changes, for our great achievements of the past three years, which put us at war with the dominant world powers, was made possible by a simple burst of political and military enthusiasm because every peasant realised, felt and sensed that he was confronted by his age-old enemy, the landowner, who in one way or another was being aided by representatives of other parties. That is why this alliance was so solid and invincible.

In the economic field the basis of this alliance has to be different. A change in the substance and form of the alliance is essential. If anyone from the Communist Party, from the trade unions, or merely anyone sympathetic to Soviet power has overlooked the need to change the form and substance of this alliance, then so much the worse for him. Such oversights in a revolution are impermissible. The change in the form of the alliance has become necessary because the political and military alliance could not continue intact in the realm of economics, when we have as yet no large-scale industry, when what we had has been ruined by a war such as no other country has ever experienced. Even in countries infinitely more wealthy than ours, in countries that had gained, not lost from the war, the level of industry has not yet risen. A change in the form and substance of the alliance of the workers and peasants has become essential. We went much further forward in the political and military period than the purely economic aspect of the alliance of the workers and peasants permitted us to do. We had to do this in order to defeat the enemy, and we had the right to do this. We were successful because we defeated our enemies in the field that existed at that time, in the political and military field, but we suffered a series of defeats in the economic field. There is no need to ho afraid to admit this; on the contrary, we shall only learn how to win when we do not fear to acknowledge our defeats and shortcomings, when we look truth, even the saddest truth, straight in the face. We have a right to be proud of our achievements in the first field, that is, in the political and military field. They have gone down in history as an epoch-making victory, whose overall influence is yet to be felt. But economically, in the year under review, we only started the New Economic Policy and we are taking a step forward in this regard. At the same time, we are only just beginning to learn and are making very many more mistakes, looking back, being carried away by our past experience—splendid, lofty, magnificent, of worldwide significance, but which could not solve the economic problems now imposed on us in a country where largescale industry has been devastated; in conditions which demand that we learn, in the first place, to establish the economic link now necessary and inevitable. That link is trade. This is a very unpleasant discovery for Communists. It is quite likely that this discovery is extremely unpleasant, in fact it is certain that it is unpleasant, hut if we are swayed by ideas of pleasantness or unpleasantness we shall fall to the level of those would-be socialists of whom we saw plenty at the time of the Kerensky Provisional Government. It is hardly likely that "socialists" of this type still have any authority in our Republic. And our strength has always been our ability to take the actual balance of forces into consideration and not to be afraid of it no matter how unpleasant it might be for us.

Since large-scale industry exists on a world scale, there can be no doubt that a direct transition to socialism is possible—and nobody will deny this fact, just as nobody will deny that this large-scale industry either comes to a standstill and creates unemployment in the most flourishing and wealthy victor countries, or only manufactures shells for the extermination of people. And if, owing to the backwardness with which we came to the revolution, we have not reached the industrial development we need, are we going to give up, are we going to despair? No. We shall get on with the hard work because the path that we have taken is the right one. There is no doubt that the path of the alliance of the mass of the people is the sole path which will ensure that the workers and peasants work for themselves and not for the exploiters. In order to bring this about in our conditions we must have the only possible economic link, the link through the economy.

That is why we have retreated, that is why we have had to retreat to state capitalism, retreat to concessions, retreat to trade. Without this, proper relations with the peasants cannot be restored in the conditions of devastation in which we now find ourselves. Without this, we are threatened with the danger of the revolution’s vanguard getting swiftly so far ahead that it would lose touch with the peasants. There would be no contact between the vanguard and the peasants and that would mean the collapse of the revolution. Our approach to this must be particularly careful, first and foremost, because what we call our New Economic Policy follows from it. That is why we have unanimously declared that we shall carry out this policy in earnest and for a long time, but, of course, as has already been correctly noted, not for ever; it has been made necessary by our poverty and devastation and by the tremendous weakening of our large-scale industry.

History has allotted us the task of completing the great political revolution by slow, hard and laborious economic work, covering a very long period. Great political changes in history have always demanded a long period of assimilation. All great political changes have come about through the enthusiasm of the vanguard, whom the masses followed spontaneously, not quite consciously. There could be no other development in a society that was oppressed by tsars, landowners and capitalists. And we carried out this part of the work, the political revolution, in a manner that makes its epoch-making significance indisputable. Subsequently, following the great political revolution, however, another task arises which must he understood: this revolution has to be assimilated, has to be put into effect, and we must not plead that the Soviet system is bad, and that it must be rebuilt. We have a tremendous number of enthusiasts who want to rebuild in any kind of way, and these reconstructions lead to calamities of a kind which I have never known in all my life. I am very well aware of the faults of our government machinery in mass organisational work, and for every ten faults that any of you can point out to me, I can immediately point out a hundred more. The thing, however, is not that it should be improved by rapid reorganisation, hut that this political transformation has to be assimilated to arrive at a different level of economic efficiency. That is the whole point. It is not necessary to rebuild, but, on the contrary, it is necessary to help correct the many faults present in the Soviet system and in the whole system of management, so as to help tens of millions of people. We need the aid of all the peasants to assimilate our great political victory. We need to look at things soberly and realise that victory has been won, but it has not yet become part and parcel of the economy of everyday life and of the living conditions of the people. This work will take many decades and will require colossal efforts. It cannot be carried out at the same rate, speed, and under the same conditions which existed during the war.

Before concluding, I want to apply this lesson—that faults are sometimes the continuation of our merits—to one of our institutions, namely, to the Cheka. You all know, comrades, the violent hatred towards this institution displayed by Russian émigrés and those numerous members of the ruling classes of the imperialist-countries who live alongside, these Russian émigrés. And no wonder! It was our effective weapon against the numerous plots and numerous attacks on Soviet power made by people who were infinitely stronger than us. The capitalists and landowners retained all their international ties and all the international support; they were supported by states incomparably more powerful than our state. You know from the history of these conspiracies how these people acted. You know that the only way in which we could reply to them was by merciless, swift and instant repression, with the sympathy and support of the workers and peasants. That is the merit of our Cheka. We shall always emphasise this whenever we hear, directly or indirectly, as we often do from abroad, the howls of those Russians who can say the word "Cheka" in all languages, and regard it as an example of Russian barbarism.

Gentlemen, Russian and foreign capitalists! We know that you will never come to love this institution. No wonder! It was able to repulse your intrigues and plots better than anyone else, at a time when you throttled us, invaded us from all sides, when you organised internal plots and committed every possible crime in order to frustrate our peaceful work. Our only response is through an institution aware of the plotters’ every move and able to retaliate immediately instead of engaging in persuasion. As long as there are exploiters in the world, who have no desire to hand over their landowner and capitalist rights to the workers on a platter, the power of the working people cannot survive without such an institution. We are keenly aware of this, but we also know that a man's merits may become his faults, and we know that prevailing conditions insistently demand that the work of this organisation he limited to the purely political sphere, that it concentrate its efforts on tasks in which it is aided by the situation and the circumstances.

If the attempts of the counter-revolution resemble their previous attempts—and we have no proof that the mentality of our adversaries has altered in this respect, we have no grounds for believing this—we shall be able to reply in such a way that will make it clear that we are in earnest. The Soviet government grants admission to foreign representatives, who come here under the pretext of giving aid, but these same representatives turn round and help overthrow Soviet rule; there have been cases of this. Our government will not find itself in this position, because we shall value and make use of an institution like the Cheka. This we can guarantee to one and all. But, at the same time, we say categorically that it is essential to reform the Cheka, define its functions and powers, and limit its work to political problems. The task now confronting us is to develop trade, which is required by the New Economic Policy, and this demands greater revolutionary legality. Naturally, if we had made this the all-important task when we were attacked and Soviet power was taken by the throat, we would have been pedants; we would have been playing at revolution, but would not be making the revolution. The closer we approach conditions of unshakable and lasting power and the more trade develops, the more imperative it is to put forward the firm slogan of greater revolutionary legality, and the narrower becomes the sphere of activity of the institution which matches the plotters blow for blow. This conclusion results from the experience, observation and reflection of the government for the past year.

I must say in conclusion, comrades, that we have placed on a correct footing the problem we have been handling this year and which up to now we have handled so badly—that of forming a sound economic alliance of the workers and peasants, even under conditions of extreme poverty and devastation; we have taken the correct line, and there can be no doubt about this. And this is not merely a task for Russia alone, it is a world task. (Stormy, prolonged applause.)

This task which we are working on now, for the time being on our own, seems to be a purely Russian one, but in reality it is a task which all socialists will face. Capitalism is dying; in its death throes it can still condemn tens and hundreds of millions of people to unparalleled torment, but there is no power that can prevent its collapse. The new society, which will be based on the alliance of the workers and peasants, is inevitable. Sooner or later it will come— twenty years earlier or twenty years later—and when we work on the implementation of our New Economic Policy, we are helping to work out for this society the forms of alliance between the workers and peasants. We shall get this done and we shall create an alliance of the workers and peasants that is so sound that no power on earth will break it. (Stormy, prolonged applause.)
NINTH ALL-RUSSIA CONGRESS OF SOVIETS	 Pravda No 292 December 25, 1921

We have never refused to take power alone. We said that as early as June 1917,61 and took power at the Congress of Soviets in October 1917. We Bolsheviks obtained a majority at that Congress of Soviets. Then Kerensky appealed to the officer cadets,63 rushed off to Krasnov and wanted to muster an army to march on Petrograd. We knocked them about a bit, and now they say in an offended tone, "You are insolent, you are usurpers, butchers!" And we say in reply, "You have only yourselves to blame, friends! Do not imagine that the Russian peasants and workers have forgotten what you did. In October you challenged us to the most desperate fight, and we retaliated with terror and redoubled terror; and we shall adopt terror again if necessary, if you try it again." Not a single worker, not a single peasant doubts the need for it. No one doubts it but whimpering intellectuals.

Under conditions of unheard-of economic hardship we were compelled to wage war against an enemy whose forces were a hundred times superior to ours. It goes without saying that under these circumstances we were obliged to go to greater lengths in our urgent communist measures than would otherwise have been the case; we were forced to do it. Our enemies thought they could finish us off; they thought they could bring us to our knees, not in words, but in deeds. They said they would not make any concessions. We replied that if they thought we dared not resort to the most extreme communist measures they were mistaken. And we did dare; we did it, and we won. Now we say we cannot hold these positions, we are retreating, because we have won enough to be able to hold essential positions. All the whiteguards, headed by the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, wax jubilant and say, "Aha, you are retreating!" We say, "Rejoice, since it puts you in good humour." We stand to gain if our enemy pats himself on the back instead of engaging in practical work. Rejoice, you are only putting us in a more favourable position by deceiving yourselves with illusions. We have captured vast positions, and had we not captured them in the period from 1917 to 1921 we would have had no room to retreat, geographically, economically or politically. We are maintaining power in alliance with the peasantry, and if you reject terms offered you before a war, you get worse terms after the war. This is definitely recorded in the diplomatic, economic and political history of the period 1917-21, so that we are not boasting at all. It is a plain statement of fact, a simple reminder. Had the capitalist gentlemen accepted the proposals we made to them in October 1917, they would have had five times as much as they have now. You fought for three years. What have you gained by it? Do you want to fight again? We know perfectly well that by no means all of you want to fight. On the other hand, we know that in view of the desperate famine and the present state of industry, we cannot hold all the positions we won in the period 1917-21. We have surrendered a number of them. But we can now say that, so far as making concessions to the capitalists is concerned, the retreat is at an end. We have weighed up our own forces and those of the capitalists. We have done some reconnoitring by way of concluding agreements with Russian and foreign capitalists, and we say—and I hope, I am sure, that the Party Congress will say the same, officially, on behalf of the ruling party of Russia—"We can now stop our economic retreat. Enough! We shall not retreat any further; we shall set about deploying and regrouping our forces properly."
INTERNATIONAL AND DOMESTIC SITUATION	 8/3/22