URSS/RUSSIA: THE HERITAGE OF THE GREAT OCTUBER REVOLUTION AND THE TASKS OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION

Report by CC CPRF Chairman Gennady Zyuganov to the March 2015 Plenary Session of the CC

Dear comrades,

It will shortly be 100 years since the greatest event of the 20^th century and the whole history of humankind. Its significance was succinctly expressed by the words of Joseph Stalin: “The October Revolution inflicted on world capitalism a deadly wound from which it will never recover… This is precisely why capitalism will never regain the ‘balance’ and ‘stability’ that it had before the October Revolution.”

The anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution is an excellent opportunity to remember its significance, to highlight the achievements of the socialist system and of course to mobilize forces in the fight for the triumph of the brightest ideals of the working people.

We should start a massive campaign to prepare for the centenary of that epoch-making event. It is equally important to verify our historical experience against the tasks of the party which is the heir to the October Revolution. The characteristic features of the first victorious proletarian revolution are of enormous significance. Therefore this is just the right time to remind people of these features without leaving out of sight those facets of the Revolution that we are coming to see in a different light. Their knowledge and understanding will prepare the Party better for the class battles for peace, genuine democracy, human rights and dignity.

Prerequisites of the Great Revolution

The socialist revolution in Russia did not occur spontaneously, on the off-chance or all of a sudden. Vladimir Lenin proved that it was inevitable relying on the wealth of theory whose foundation was laid by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. In practice the victory of the Revolution was prepared by the Leninist Party whose stainless weapon was Bolshevism.

The greatest discovery made by Lenin was that capitalism had morphed into a new and higher stage, imperialism. Free competition was replaced by monopolies. The merger of banking and industrial capital produced financial capital. Export of capital came to exceed the export of goods. The colonial division of the world was completed.

Capitalist competition remained and inevitably resulted in uneven development of various countries. Under imperialism this created a situation when the world became a single chain of capitalism and the division of markets signified a re-division of a world that had already been divided. Lenin then went on to draw the second important conclusion: under imperialism there inevitably is a weak link in the capitalist chain. The imperialist predators seek to strengthen their positions at its expense.

The chain of capitalism can be broken in its weakest link. In that link capital may or may not be able to withstand the onslaught of the proletarian forces. This led the founder of Bolshevism to the third outstanding discovery: under imperialism the socialist revolution may initially triumph just in several countries or even in one country.

Profound analysis convinced Lenin that the weakest link in the chain of imperialism was the Russian Empire and that Russia could become the birthplace of the socialist revolution. First, the country was pregnant with revolution even before it passed on to the imperialist stage. Back in 1875 Friedrich Engels wrote: “Russia is undoubtedly on the eve of a revolution… It will destroy at one blow the last and still untouched reserve of reaction in the whole of Europe.”

Secondly, the First Russian Revolution had ended in defeat. The contradictions that it had failed to resolve remained and needed to be resolved.

And thirdly, in the early 20^th century the centre of the world revolutionary process moved from Germany to Russia. This was noted for example, by Karl Kautsky who at the time was still a staunch Marxist.

Russia represented a tangle of acute contradictions. The contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, between the Tsarist feudal superstructure and the alliance of the bourgeoisie and the liberal land owners, between land owners and the peasantry. Between the kulaks (rich peasants), middle-level and poor peasants in the midst of the peasantry, the most numerous class in Russia. Superimposed on these contradictions were: those between the rural bourgeoisie and the rural community. The land and nationalities problems had come to a head. There were contradictions between regions and religions. There was growing antagonism between town and countryside.

The World War aggravated all these social contradictions and added some new antagonisms. The sense that the revolution was imminent became all-pervading. “The year 1916 is approaching in a crown of thorns,” wrote Vladimir Mayakovsky. We find similar motives in the work of Alexander Blok and other poets and writers.

But Lenin could not rely on the predictions of poets. His credo was rigorous scientific analysis. “There can be no revolution without a revolutionary situation,” he insisted and gave his classical definition of a revolutionary situation. First: for a revolution it is necessary that “the lower orders do not” want to live in the old way and “the rulers are unable” to rule in the old way, i.e. to be unable to preserve their dominance unchanged. Second: “the privation and hardship of the oppressed classes are aggravated more than usual. Third: there is a surge in the activity of the masses which allow “themselves to be robbed” in a “peaceful” era but mature for “independent historical action” in turbulent times.

The Russian people rightly called the World War the “imperialist” war. It had brought the poverty and hardship of the oppressed classes to a limit. Suffice it to recall that in 1916 the Tsarist government formed food requisitioning units for the first time in Russian history. Their task was to take away “surplus” grain from the peasants in the face of the threatening famine in the Empire’s major cities.

The country was swept by strikes. In January 1917 400,000 people took part in them. The war had made it necessary to give weapons to millions of workers and peasants, the masses of soldiers were becoming increasingly responsive to the socialist ideas. Thus, on October 25, 1916 a massive demonstration took place in Petrograd against the trial of the Baltic Fleet seamen whom the authorities persecuted for creating a Bolshevik organization. Such episodes were becoming increasingly frequent.

The inability of the “rulers” to rule in the old way manifested itself dramatically. The sway of Rasputin was vivid proof that the Tsarist regime was rotten down to the last cell. Mysticism – an evident sign of confusion and ignorance - was widespread in the higher circles of the Empire.

Russia was engulfed by a systemic crisis of capitalism. The country had already become part of the capitalist chain. But its feudal elite was unable to master the bourgeois management of governance. Even the liberal sections of the bourgeoisie were closely linked with Tsarism and only sought to give it a more appealing look.

A revolutionary situation took shape in the Russian Federation. But for a revolution to happen objective conditions are not enough. What is needed is mass actions by the revolutionary class that are strong enough to overturn the old government “which will never ‘fall’ even in the crisis era unless it is ‘dropped’”. Lenin remembered well the words of Marx and Engels: “The working class can oppose the united power of the propertied classes as a class only having organized itself into a political party that opposes all the old parties: organization of the working class into a political party is necessary to ensure the victory of the socialist revolution…”

For Lenin the proletariat and its party formed a unity in the revolution. The Party was playing the role of vanguard. The existence of a vanguard party is the key subjective factor of the Revolution.

Lenin and his followers managed to bring together the creative revolutionary forces to achieve the victory of the Great October Revolution. Bolshevism claims the main credit for the solution of that task. Having started with Lenin’s Iskra (Spark) it formed an organization as early as the summer of 1903 at the historic 2^nd Congress of the RSDLP.  Already in the course of the First Russian Revolution it proved its ideological, political and tactical validity. The word “Bolshevism” has entered dozens of languages across the world not in translation but the way it sounds in the original. That fact alone speaks about the historic scale of the phenomenon. Bolshevism is a consistently Marxist revolutionary current in the international workers’ movement. It emerged in the specific conditions that prevailed in Russia. But the October Revolution cannot be seen as a revolution “within the national framework.” These are the opening words of I.V.Stalin’s article written for the 10th anniversary of the October Revolution. And he continues:

“It is above all a revolution on an international world scale because it marks a radical turning point in the world history of humankind from the old capitalist world to a new socialist world… One cannot deny that the mere fact of the existence of the ‘Bolshevik state’ reins in the dark forces of reaction facilitating the struggle of the oppressed classes for their liberation. This, in fact, accounts for the gut hatred that the exploiters of all countries feel for the Bolsheviks.”

The Leninist Party did not “construct” Bolshevism by putting national garb on Marxism. It offered it as a convincing answer to the fact that capitalism was entering its imperialist stage. It helped the Russian revolutionary movement to become an advance unit in the struggle against monopoly capitalism and its leading force, the financial oligarchy.

Bolshevism is a combination of the proletarian movement with scientific socialism. It consistently implements the doctrine of the class struggle of the proletariat, of the socialist revolution, the dictatorship of the working class, the building of socialism in the conditions of capitalist encirclement.

Proletarian internationalism is a characteristic feature of Bolshevism. It invariably follows the principles of international solidarity of working people and skillfully links the general laws of the struggle for socialism with national, regional and historical features.

As an alternative to Menshevism, Bolshevism rejects social appeasement, opportunism and revisionism. It upholds the purity of Marxist-Leninist theory, combats its falsifications, and opposes the convergence of communist and social-democratic ideologies. By the same token, Bolshevism rejects sectarianism and seeks to unite left-wing forces in their confrontation with the dictatorship of capital.

Bolshevism is a truly outstanding phenomenon. It combines the romanticism of lofty dreams and pragmatic actions, adherence to principle and flexible tactics, brimming energy and hard calculation.

The Bolshevik party is the party of the socialist revolution, of socialist creative activity and the Communist perspective. The greatest achievement of V.I. Lenin and his followers is the creation of a new type of political party. Its task is to direct the proletarian movement towards the struggle for socialism.

The concepts of “Bolshevik party” and “the party of a new type” are virtually synonymous. The Bolshevik Party brought into a single stream the irreconcilable struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie and the peasants’ struggle for land. Merging with the revolutionary liberation movement of the colonial and oppressed peoples it opened up broad vistas for uniting the social-class and national-liberation struggles.

Leninist Bolsheviks consistently upheld the proletarian character of the Party. “The main driving force of the movement is the organized workers at large factories,” Lenin maintained insisting that “every factory must become our stronghold” . This task is fully relevant for the CPRF today.

The party of a new type is distinguished by an organic unity of firm and conscious discipline and broad internal democracy. It enabled Leninists to cover the difficult road from organizing the Party to organizing power after the victory of the socialist Revolution.

The new power established itself so rapidly, firmly and in a such a businesslike manner that as early as 1919 the Moscow correspondent of the Chicago Daily News wrote that never in the history of contemporary Russia had the government enjoyed such genuine and great authority as the Soviet power today. When you entered Soviet Russia you immediately noticed that whatever Bolshevism might be it was certainly not identical with anarchy. Having spent some time in the Communist republic one was amazed because the situation there was the opposite of what the American people had. There was no disorder. You were safer in the streets of Petrograd and Moscow than in the streets of New York and Chicago.

Soviet power represented a qualitatively new type of statehood. Relying on the root traditions of Russian peoples it combined the creativity of the working masses and their culture. The vertical structure “people-Soviets-party of the new type” proved to be an effective system thanks to the unity of interests and goals.

On October 26 (November 8) 1917 the II All-Russia Congress of the Soviets of Workers and Soldiers’ Deputies formed the supreme body of the Soviet state. The All-Russia Central Executive Committee included 62 Bolsheviks, 29 Left-Wing Social Revolutionaries, 6 Internationalist Social Democrats, 3 Ukrainian Socialists and 1 Maximalist Socialist Revolutionary. Very soon the allies and fellow travelers of the Bolsheviks left the political scene one after another.

Soviet power became a distinct social milieu. In this environment all the other parties except the Bolshevik Party were in a position of “non-systemic parties”. This was not by any means done by “Commissars in leather jackets”. These parties were “non-systemic” with regard to Soviet power from the very start. Why? Because all of them, including the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries, were elements of the bourgeois system. Only the Bolsheviks proved to be a party of the new type not only in terms of organization but socially and politically. That is why they had massive and vigorous support of all the working people of Russia.

The truth of history is on our side

It is becoming ever more evident that capitalism is reactionary and has no historical perspective. In defending itself it ascribes to socialism violence, lies, hypocrisy and all the other vices that it has. It is waging a crusade against historical memory on which the great achievements of the Soviet era are etched. It generates vicious myths and falsifications. It calls black white and white black. The apologists for capitalism use anti-Sovietism as a means of justifying and saving capitalism. Their aggression against historical memory is logical. It is necessary in order to transform socialist national consciousness into bourgeois consciousness.

As early as 1918 Lenin exposed the double standards of the defenders of capitalism in a letter to the American workers: “We are accused of destruction wreaked by our revolution. But who are the accusers? The underlings of the bourgeoisie. The very bourgeoisie which during the four years of the imperialist war, having destroyed almost the whole of European culture, brought Europe to a state of barbarism, savagery and famine. This bourgeoisie now demands that we pursue the revolution not on the basis of all this destruction, not amid the fragments of culture, the debris and ruins created by the war, not with the people who have been turned into savages by this war. Oh, how humane and just is the bourgeoisie.

“Its servants are accusing us of terror… The English bourgeoisie has forgotten its own 1649 and the French its 1793. Terror was fair and legitimate when it was used by the bourgeoisie for its own benefit against the feudal lords. Terror became monstrous and criminal where workers and the poorest peasants dared to use it… to overthrow all exploitative minorities.”

If one follows the logic of anti-Sovietism, there should be no violence, no blood, no destruction and no mistakes in a revolution. But who frenziedly resisted Soviet power? Who was the first to launch terror against it? Who sacrificed national interests in order to regain power? Who put their class interests above Russia’s independence?

On the eve of the first anniversary of the creation of the Red Army of Workers and Peasants Stalin wrote: “The world has decisively and irrevocably split into two camps: the camp of imperialism and the camp of socialism.” Yes, it split as soon as power in Russia was taken over by the Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasant Deputies. Because of this our opponents scream about a civil war unleashed by the Bolsheviks. But there are hard facts. On March 12, 1918 Izvestia VTSIK published Lenin’s article ‘The Main Task of the Present Day’. The task was set as follows: ‘To make sure at any cost that Rus ceases to be humble and impotent, that it becomes in the full sense of the word mighty and abundant.’ Is there a single word about the civil war?

The Bolshevik leader sets an exclusive creative task. He could not have set it in any other way because “having overthrown the bourgeoisie within several weeks we overcame its open resistance during the course of the Civil War. Bolshevism marched triumphantly from one end of the vast country to the other”.

Make no mistake: the Civil War allegedly unleashed by the Bolsheviks was completed within several weeks. It was a very different war that saw so much bloodshed. It was the war for the sake of which General Alexeyev had left for Novocherkassk on the fifth day after the victory of Soviet power. It was the war in which 14 bourgeois states that dreamed of strangling the young republic of the Soviets had a hand. As early as November 1917 the Entente countries called a meeting at Lasi to work out a plan of war in southern Russia. In December of that same year an Entente conference in Paris decided to support and issue credits to the counterrevolutionary governments of Ukraine, the Cossack areas, Siberia and the Caucasus.

During the Intervention and the Civil War the bourgeoisie and the land owners betrayed national interests right and left. Today’s anti-Sovieteers prefer not to mention this. Both the liberals and White Guard patriots would rather not mention this truth of history. Lenin’s relentless objectivity hurts their eyes even today. The exploitative minority did possess have and will never possess such truth. Its leaders are unable to speak of the people the way Lenin could speak. This is what he said in the grim year 1918:

“Let the venal bourgeois press trumpet to the whole world every mistake that our revolution is making. We are not afraid of our mistakes. People have not become saints because the revolution began. The working classes which have been oppressed for centuries… were squeezed in the vice of poverty, ignorance and savagery cannot carry out a revolution without mistakes… The capitalism that has been killed is rotting and decomposing in our midst contaminating the air with miasma, poisoning our life, grabbing all that is new, fresh, young and living with thousands of threads and links to what is old, rotten and dead.”

Lenin’s truth dispels the anti-Soviet myth about the Bolsheviks concealing the dramas and tragedies of the Revolution. Studying the history of the Great October Revolution based on Leninist sources,  studying Soviet history based on Stalin’s works, educating young people who seek this truth are the tasks we must address actively and persistently. Bourgeois ideologists are at pains to ascribe to Lenin what is characteristic of bourgeois politicians. Allegedly, he did not think about victims for the sake of achieving his goal. Lenin’s works written shortly before the October armed uprising in Petrograd, give the lie to these allegations. Yes, the history of great revolutions pointed to the danger of a civil war. But Lenin did everything to avoid it. His famous “April Theses” argued that a peaceful transition of power from the Provisional bourgeois government to the Soviets of Workers’, Peasants’ and Soldiers’ Deputies was possible. He was convinced this was possible until the middle of 1917. Everything changed on July 4. After the shooting down of a peaceful demonstration of workers, soldiers and seamen Lenin wrote: “The slogan ‘All Power to the Soviets’ was the immediate step slogan: it was a slogan of peaceful development of the Revolution which was possible between February 27 and July 4 and which was of course highly desirable, but which is now definitely impossible”.

Yet even in the new conditions Lenin looked for ways of peaceful transition of power to the Soviets. In early September 1917, in an article “On Compromises” he wrote that if there was “one chance in a hundred” to avoid a civil war one should avail oneself of this chance. In mid- September in an article “The Russian Revolution and the Civil War” Lenin argued: “Only an alliance of the Bolsheviks with the social revolutionaries and the Mensheviks, only an immediate transition of all power to the Soviets would have made the Civil War in Russia impossible.” But the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries did not renounce their alliance with the bourgeoisie. The possibility to avoid a civil war was thus lost.

With the victory of the October Revolution proletarian dictatorship was established in our country in the form of the Soviets. It solved the formidable historic task of protecting the people. This is yet another fact that is hushed up by the anti-Sovieteers of every stripe.

In 1919 – the most difficult year of the Civil War – Lenin said the words that still ring true today: “If we save the working man, save the main productive force of humanity – the worker – we will regain everything, but we will perish if we fail to save him”. Soviet power saved the worker, restored what had been lost and created a mighty industrial power. This fact carries a great creative message which we must bring to mass consciousness.

The dramatic transformation of Russia was keenly sensed by contemporaries. In 1919 the English philosopher Bertrand Russel wrote that even in the conditions that prevailed in Russia at the time one could feel the enthusiasm generated by the main ideas of Communism, the ideas of creative hope that seek to put an end to injustice, tyranny and violence and that impede man’s spiritual growth… This hope helped the best among the Communists to survive through the difficult years Russia lived through inspiring the whole world… Whether Russian communism would fail or would develop, Communism in general would not die.

The heritage of the Great October Revolution will be relevant not only after we overcome the restoration of capitalism. It is already necessary today, at the current stage of class struggle. For the CPRF the “task of the moment” is to save the working man, be it a worker or engineer, a peasant or a teacher. We are mindful of this when we oppose privatization and the bankruptcy of enterprises, when we seek a revision of the Labour, Land and Housing Codes, when we oppose the destruction of the education system and the decimation of the Academy of Sciences, when we worked to secure the adoption of the law on industrial policy. All these are peaceful forms of political struggle and they must be multiplied.

The CPRF undoubtedly wants to see revolutionary transformation and resurgence of our country carried out by peaceful means. Among these instruments are nationalization of the property of oligarchs and restoration of the Soviet system of state power on the basis of a nationwide referendum. The aim of these measures is to bring about a radical change of the social and political system in Russia.

The struggle against capital acquires a non-peaceful character in response to its aggressiveness, as it adopts the policy of mass repressions and cruelly suppresses social protest. Then a non-peaceful revolution asserts itself and, according to Lenin, the readiness of the working class “to translate the passive state of oppression into an active state of indignation and uprising” becomes key. The proletarian vanguard – the Communist Party – must be ready for such a development of events. As the Universal Declaration of Human Rights passed by the UN General Assembly notes, power must concern itself with the needs of the people so that they would not have to resort to “an uprising against tyranny and oppression”.

The ability to see the correlation of the situation and the forms of the struggle against capitalism is a key lesson that the Bolshevik Party taught us in the 1917 revolution.

The Soviet Science of Creating

Towards the end of his life I.V.Stalin wrote: “The special role of Soviet power stems from two circumstances: first, the fact that Soviet power was not meant to replace one form of exploitation with another form, as happened during the course of earlier revolutions, but to liquidate all exploitation; second, because, owing to the absence in the country of any elements of the socialist economy it had to create “from scratch,” so to speak, new socialist forms of economic management”.

Soviet government came to grips with these tasks immediately after winning the Civil War and driving foreign invaders out of the country. However, the country was still encircled by enemies. This prompted the need to preserve the command-and-administer principles of interaction between the socialist basis and its state superstructure, both socio-economic and political.

In the era of socialism the decisive role is played by economic policy. As V.I.Lenin wrote: “The essence of the transition from capitalist society to socialist society is that political tasks are subordinate to economic tasks.” I.V.Stalin devoted his book “Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR” to the objective laws of socialist society. In it he proceeds from the Marxist-Leninist doctrine to study the outstanding experience of the first decades of socialist construction.

One of the most important steps for the young Soviet Republic was the decision of the X Congress of the RCP (B) in March 1921 on the transition to the New Economic Policy. Among the Party members there were many who considered the NEP to be a retreat that would have  tragic consequences for the revolution. This was a position not only of Trotsky, but even of such dedicated supporters of Lenin as the People’s Commissar for Food, Tsyuryupa. However, the fact that as a result of heated debates at the X Congress Lenin prevailed showed that the majority of communists accepted Lenin’s pivotal idea that political tasks took second place compared with economic ones. We Communists, in preparing to run the country, must make a thorough study of this historical experience. Today there are those who like to draw an analogy between Lenin’s NEP and the Gorbachev perestroika. They invoke the New Economic Policy of the 1920s to discredit the key role of the state in managing the economy in order to continue to impose on our society the idea of “self-regulated market” which has proved to be untenable.

However, “the free market ideology turned out to be just a pretext for using new forms of exploitation”. This was not a statement of some Communist ideologist, but of the American Joseph Stiglits , winner of the Nobel Prize for economics.

No comparisons of Gorbachev’s perestroika and the practice of the early Soviet years hold water. By the beginning of 1921 the young Soviet Republic was in a desperate situation. The country had been ravaged by two wars, the First World War and the Civil War. Between 1913 and 1921 industrial output shrank almost fivefold. Agricultural production dropped by half. Hostilities, hunger and epidemics carried away at least 25 million lives.

When the decision to introduce the New Economic Policy was taken the Japanese invaders and their White underlings were still on the rampage in the Far East. The country had been hit by crop failure and famine. Kulak riots were raging in the Kuban and Don areas, in Ukraine, the Volga Area and in Siberia. An anti-Bolshevik mutiny erupted in Kronstadt right when the X RCP(B) Congress was being held. It was a life-or-death situation for Soviet power. Either the Bolsheviks would triumph and continue to build socialism or the world bourgeoisie would destroy the young Republic of the Soviets.

The state of our country six decades later was fundamentally different. By the mid-1980s the powerful economic, scientific-technical and cultural potential had turned the USSR into a leading world country. Thus the NEP was used by the Soviet government to save the country and create a strong state. Perestroika destroyed the country and eliminated the Soviet system.

Lenin set forth the basic principles of the Bolshevik economic policy long before the 10^th RCP(B) Congress. In his article “The Immediate Tasks of Soviet Power” he proved that there had to be a transition period between the capitalist and socialist economy and described the main conditions for such a historic transition. This also formed the subject of other articles he wrote at that time: “On Food Tax”, “On Cooperation”, “On the Importance of Gold Today and after the Victory of Socialism”.

In all the articles and speeches Lenin revealed a profound insight into the situation and a sense of responsibility for the country’s future. Addressing the X Congress of the RCP(B) he said: “Comrades, the question of replacing food requisitioning with tax is first and foremost a political question because the essence of the question is the attitude of the working class to the peasantry”. And he stresses: “You cannot deceive social classes.” These words of Lenin are informed with precision and truthfulness. They cannot be compared to Gorbachev’s demagoguery about “socialism with a human face”.

The perestroika reforms launched processes that proved to be catastrophic for the country. The architects of this policy never presented their goals to the citizens. By contrast, the Bolshevik Party set these goals with crystal clarity. Lenin said:  “We tell the peasants frankly, honestly and without any cheating: in order to stay the course towards socialism we will make a number of concessions to you, comrade peasants, but only within certain limits and only to a degree and of course we will ourselves decide to what degree and what limits these would be.”

In the late 1980s, was there as much as a hint of such truthfulness and sense of responsibility in Yeltsin’s speeches delivered from podiums with the posters that read “All Power to the Soviets”? Four years would pass and in October 1993 he would issue the beastly order to shoot down Soviet power and those who rose to defend it. Clinging to his presidential autocracy this “renewer of socialism” would start issuing decrees on the privatization of the national wealth hastening to create a new Russian bourgeoisie.

In his works on transitional economies Lenin looked at the national economy as a whole. Therefore in announcing the NEP he again turned to the GOELRO plan which would enable the country to move forward rapidly.

As the head of the Soviet of People’s Commissars he realized that it was not enough to allow the peasants to produce and keep surplus farm produce to themselves. It was important to create conditions for its marketing, for earning and developing the peasant farms. Hence the close attention to trade and consumer cooperation. Consumer cooperation made it possible to provide the peasants with industrial goods and to buy their produce. The role of the state during the NEP period was, if anything, growing stronger. It was this state policy that turned poor peasants into well-to-do peasants.

The current Russian government, hamstrung by liberal dogma about the state removing itself from economic management, is unable to solve the problems in industry, science, agriculture, construction or trade. There is no coherent policy in these spheres today. In such conditions an economic upsurge is simply inconceivable.

Stalin took on board Lenin’s ideas about the role of economic policy. At the XIV Congress of the AUCP (B) in 1925 he said: “We must make our country economically self-sufficient, independent, based on the internal market… we must build our economy so that our country does not become an appendage of the world capitalist system, so that it is not included in the general scheme of capitalist development as an auxiliary enterprise, so that our economy develops… as an independent economic entity based on the link between our industry and the peasant economies of our country.” The people understood these ideas. They united Soviet society in the struggle for the independence of the USSR.

The goal of creating an industrial basis set by Stalin was achieved. In 1922-1929, by the beginning of the First Five-Year Plan Period, more than 2000 large industrial enterprises had been built. The country’s successes were recognized even by its opponents. In January 1932 the French newspaper Temps wrote that the USSR had won the first round by industrializing without the assistance of foreign capital. The French newspaper were echoed by the British Financial Times which noted that  the successes achieved in engineering were undeniable… The USSR was producing all the equipment it needed for its metallurgical and electrical industries. It had managed to create its own automobile industry. It created the production of tools and instruments running the gamut from the smallest high-precision instruments to the heaviest of presses.

Modern Russian anti-Communists have every reason to hate Soviet power. The heroic breakthroughs under Lenin and Stalin dwarf those who consigned Russia to a debt pit, borrowed dollar credits from foreign banks, took their money to offshore banks, bled the Russian economy white, humiliated and robbed our citizens. The Bolsheviks were leading our country to the frontiers of progress. The policy of the liberal authorities guarantees its plunder. In his book The Men Who Stole the World the American Nicholas Shaxson wrote that the citizens of Russia and many other countries were watching powerlessly the national elites plundering the wealth of their countries and colluding with the Western financiers and businessmen to hide the booty in offshores and to evade taxes.

During the two first Five-Year Plan Periods under Stalin a powerful potential was built. In 1937 80% of industrial output of the USSR was produced at enterprises built between 1929 and 1937. Labour productivity doubled during the same period. Particular attention was paid to science and education. Cultural amenities were being built actively: theatres, cinemas, libraries, children’s clubs. They were springing up both in rural and industrial areas.

The American writer Theodore Dreiser wrote in 1937 that he was particularly grateful to the Soviet Revolution for being the first to raise so sharply on a world scale the issue of the haves and have-nots. In 1917 the Soviet Union embarked on the great march in defense of the have-nots. This showed the world significance and triumph of Marxism. To use labor, agriculture, industry, the natural wealth, technology, human knowledge, man’s power over nature, to use all this for the benefit of all the working people in order to ensure a comfortable and cultured life for all of them: this was a lesson the Soviet Revolution was teaching the rest of mankind.

Having prevailed in the life-and-death struggle against fascism the Soviet Union was able to quickly restore the devastated economy, the cities and villages. By 1952 the rate of new housing construction was 8 times that of 1925. Science and education had reached new heights.  All this proved irrefutably the advantages of socialism as a social and economic system. This advantage still causes the adepts of capitalism to challenge Soviet history. They persistently distort the truth about the war and the victory of the people who have upheld the socialist gains and saved the world from fascism.

Stalin’s death was an irreparable loss for the country. With his departure the USSR lost a loyal follower of Lenin who had mastered Marxism and was consistently strengthening the socialist character of the country’s economy. A retreat began from the key Leninist principle: to solve economic tasks using the objective laws of social development. Political command decisions in the economic sphere were becoming the norm.

In 1957 sectoral ministries were replaced with Economic Councils. This violated the law of planned proportional development that Stalin considered to be of decisive importance. Three years later the sectoral ministries had to be restored, but the quality of planning and efficient links between the sectors had been substantially weakened.

In 1958, under Nikita Khrushchev it was decided to transfer machine and tractor stations to the collective farms. That dramatically undermined the efficiency of the use of farm machinery. While between 1954 and 1958 agricultural output in the country increased by 46%, there was no growth in 1958-1963 and crop yields were falling.

For all the shortcomings the CC CPSU and the USSR Council of Ministers paid great attention to improving the methods of economic management. One instance of this was the thorough discussion within the Party circles of the economic management reform in 1965-1970. It went down in history as the Kosygin reform. During the course of that reform, profit – the basic category of the market economy – came to be regarded as the main indicator of the performance of enterprises. This contradicted the objective laws of the socialist system, something Stalin had warned against. Making an absolute of the profit factor contradicted the principle of planned economic development.

Yes, the years 1965-1970 were marked by a high rate of growth of the gross domestic product, by an average 7.4% a year. The average growth of the national revenue was 7.7%. This was partly the result of the introduction of systems of economic stimulation and material incentives. The enterprises and industries were allowed to make deductions to the material incentive funds and to production development funds. This is fully in line with the Leninist principles of cost accounting. However, these funds were not used for the purpose for which they were created. The desire to gain profit did not stimulate the enterprises to spend money on development and on the introduction of new technologies. Scientific and technological progress began to slow down. The qualitative gap between science and production was widening. The problem was never solved.

The oil and gas export revenues were not used in the best possible way. Until the mid-1980s they stimulated the import of goods. This had a negative impact on the pace of scientific and technological progress. More and more goods in the Soviet consumer market were manufactured in the Western countries. It helped the “stewards of perestroika” to convince people of the advantages of the capitalist economy and get across the message that “the free market” is a noble goal for the sake of which the abuses of shock therapy and landslide privatization had to be endured.

It was very difficult to build a powerful socialist economy. This was accomplished by people of immense intellect and lofty spiritual principles – Lenin, Stalin and their fellow workers. The whole people took part in this great creative process. The people who were destroying the Soviet economy were ignorant people who had no grasp of the Marxist-Leninist theory and had rejected the massive experience of the Soviet era. They were unable to learn to manage the complicated system of governance, to use scientific methods in the process and to elevate the country to a new level of socialist development. Eventually production relations came to contradict the powerful productive forces.

The former head of the US Federal Reserve System Alan Greenspan was openly jubilant writing that the economic significance of the collapse of the Soviet Union was immense… that more than a billion low-paid often well- educated workers streamed to the world competitive market… Such labour migration in the market brought down the world level of wages, inflation, inflationary expectations and interest rates and thus contributed to global economic growth.

The “benefits” from the collapse of the great socialist power are enjoyed by those who concentrated the levers of managing the global capitalist economy in their hands. Meanwhile the citizens of the USSR suffered colossal losses. The preservation of oligarchic, comprador capitalism suggests that Russia has yet to experience the worst consequences of the destruction of the socialist economy.

All the generations of Communists should learn this well: the building of socialism is a scientifically validated and scientifically managed process. Socialism has a unique feature: given the knowledge of the laws of social development its creators are able to greatly accelerate social and economic progress.

The Causes of Temporary Setbacks

Dear comrades, today we face a special set of circumstances. The combined forces of the imperialist West and internal counterrevolution have done their job. With direct complicity of the Gorbachev group the victory of bourgeois counterrevolution and restoration of capitalism were ensured in the vast spaces of the Soviet Motherland and in the fellow socialist countries. We must honestly explain to people why we failed to safeguard the gains of the Soviet people. Why we have failed to protect the dreams of all the generations that were building a great power and more than once rose to overthrow the power of exploiters. Why in the 1980s we failed to safeguard the honor and integrity of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Gorbachev began his activities as General Secretary of the CPSU not with the notorious perestroika but with a reasonable slogan of accelerating the country’s development. The call for combining the achievements of scientific and technological progress with the advantages of socialism relied on the ideas of the Brezhnev time. However, acceleration under Gorbachev acquired a criminal character.

In late 1986 a decision was made to create new, essentially bourgeois cooperatives. Indeed, to enable them to make private profit, they were allowed to use public means of production. That marked the first step towards social stratification. It provided the basis for the emergence of an alliance of “shadow business”, the dissident intellectuals and the “stewards” of the new cooperatives. Before long they were joined by the heads of the early commercial banks and business structures created under the masthead of the Komsomol.

The legal renunciation of the property of the whole people which was declared the property of the state was a disgraceful move which had a far-reaching goal. To privatize the property of the whole people would have required the consent of its owner – the people. However, a referendum on the issue was never contemplated by the leaders of perestroika. After the “transformation” of property all that was needed to sell it into private hands was government resolutions.

The team of turncoats step by step legitimized the transition towards the capitalist way of life. The law On Property in the USSR was passed on March 6, 1990, the law On the General Principles of Entrepreneurship of the Citizens of the USSR was passed on April 2, 1991 and the law On the Basic Principles of Denationalization and Privatization of Enterprises was passed on July 1, 1991. It became possible to transfer state-owned enterprises into private hands.

Gorbachev and the people around him did virtually nothing to maintain people’s living standards. On the contrary, in order to foment popular discontent they contributed to creating a shortage of the basic necessities.

The turning point for political dismantling of socialism was the plenary session of the CC CPSU of 1987. The Party General Secretary led the attack on the Party cadre. Before long the Trotskyite slogans of “targeting the headquarters” were heard. In violation of the Party Charter more than 100 full and alternate members of the CC were dropped. They included recent members of the Politbureau and prominent Soviet leaders. Next 97% of the secretaries and department chiefs of the Central Committees of the Communist Parties in the Union Republics, regional committees and area committees of the CPSU, almost all the heads of central and republican newspapers and magazines were replaced.

The Party leadership openly demonstrated its renunciation of its traditional social base. While at the XXVII Congress of the CPSU 34% of the delegates were workers, 17.4% were collective farmers, there were only 11.6% of workers and 5.4% of collective farmers among the delegates to the XVIII Party Congress.

Renunciation of the working class as the social base was understandable. For it was the workers who rejected not only the so-called “market” which was a cunning way of a return to capitalism. Almost 90% of the workers who spoke at the Congress from the podium or from the floor, criticized Gorbachev and demanded that the performance of the Central Committee be declared to be unsatisfactory.

Gennady Pershin , an electrician from Irkutsk, thus explained this position: “The decisions of the XXVII Congress of the CPSU have by and large not been fulfilled. Because of this I think that giving an unsatisfactory mark would adequately describe the activities of the CC and the Politbureau during the report period.”

To facilitate the restoration of capitalism conditions were created for the Party to abandon the working class. The opportunistic Gorbachev supporters even smuggled into public consciousness the idea of banning the activities of Party organizations at enterprises and institutions. In 1990 the possibility of the CPSU switching to the territorial principle was widely discussed.

The principles of party building were violated more and more frequently and openly. In fact Gorbachev was no longer accountable to the Central Committee. To forestall his possible dismissal from the post of General Secretary he got himself elected to this post by the Congress, for the first time in the Party’s history.

The position of the CPRF is well known: restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union was not inevitable. But because the laws of social development were neglected objective circumstances conspired to facilitate the implementation of the counterrevolutionary plans of world capital and home-bred traitors.

First, the Soviet leadership overestimated the level of the development of the USSR. In reality society had not yet reached the stage of “mature socialism”. Meanwhile, in the period of transition from capitalism to socialism economic contradictions may result in crises. In 1986 the then Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR Nikolai  Ryzhkov warned the XXVII CPSU Congress of some alarming trends of 1981-1985. Economic performance indicators had worsened. Industrial output growth had slowed down. The rise of the real incomes practically stopped. There were shortfalls in meeting the  targets of the 11^th Five-Year Plan. Many sectors failed to meet the targets. The targets for raising the real incomes and increasing retail trade had not been met. The financial and monitoring situation had become more complicated. At the second stage of perestroika, in 1987-1990s, isolated crisis phenomena began to develop into a full-scale crisis because of the counterrevolutionary actions of the Gorbachev group. The year 1990 was the most difficult year for the Soviet economy.

Second, a revolution only develops successfully when it sets the tasks it is capable of solving. In other words, the tasks for which objective conditions had matured. Running ahead of oneself is fraught with dire consequences. Thus the task of “full-scale building of communism” set by the XXII Congress of the CPSU was unrealistic. Moreover, it was set in a patently incompetent way: the creation of the material and technical basis of Communism was interpreted as matching the economic performance indicators of the USA. This suggested that there was already the basis for … Communism within the framework of American capitalism. One example of “running ahead of oneself” in the 1970s was the concept of eliminating unpromising villages, which inflicted great damage on agriculture, especially in the Non-Black Soil Zone of Russia.

Third, throughout the existence of the USSR there was a persistent threat of aggression on the part of imperialist forces. The debilitating Cold War lasted for more than four decades. Zbigniew  Brzezinski stresses that the arms race was ruining the Soviet state. Nevertheless the Soviet Union had achieved military parity with the USA and was able to use the achievements of the scientific-technical revolution to increase the production of quality consumer goods. However that opportunity had been missed. Perestroika broke out…

These are just some of the objective phenomena that created conditions for the restoration of capitalism. Of course the subjective factor also had to be involved. And in this connection one regrets to have to note the extremely negative role of such individuals as Gorbachev and Yeltsin, Yakovlev and Shevardnadze. One has only to think of their extraordinary vanity and personal lack of integrity from which, as it turned out, there was but a step to betrayal.

Is there a need today to discuss the traitors who had infiltrated the Party then when discussing the 100^th anniversary of the Great October Revolution? Yes, there is. First, in order to prevent a repeat of a similar disaster. Second, in order to bring it home to everyone: what our compatriots saw in the perestroika years was not genuine but deformed socialism. In the eyes of many Russians today there is a distorted image of Soviet socialism and the Communist Party. They are in the shadow of what some people call “catastroika,” others “gorbostroika” and others again “the Yeltsin dementia”.

Yes, we resolutely dissociate our Party history from some actions and some individuals. We are very well aware that the Communists need protection from new turncoats and traitors, and that this calls for vigilance and loyalty to the Leninist call: “More light.” Criticism and self-criticism is the lot of the strong and every generation of Party members must understand and remember this. However, we Communists should not entirely dissociate ourselves even from the perestroika era. After all, it was the people of that time who had remained loyal to the ideal and loyal to the working people who formed the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. It was created by those who understood that the retreat of socialism was temporary. Those who were ready to act to assert truth and justice. Having survived the tragedy of the defeat of socialism in the expanse of their country, Russian Communists prevented a demise of their party and are bravely and worthily fighting for the resurgence of their country.

Unshakeable conviction is the most valuable part of the legacy which we are not renouncing. It goes back to the fighters on Krasnaya Presnya in 1905, to the dedicated Bolsheviks Ivan Babushkin and Nikolai Bauman, to Ivan Voinov, a pointsman on the Nikolayevskaya Railway who was killed in the summer of 1917 for distributing copies of the Pravda, to Nikolai Lazo who was burned alive in a steam engine furnace by Japanese occupiers in 1920… Our convictions have strong reinforcement bars. They hold together the framework of our cause. This helps the Communists to move forward again and again.

The legacy that we cherish

Esteemed participants and guests of the Plenary Session,

We are talking about the 100^th anniversary of the Great October Revolution on the eve of another red-letter date, the 70^th anniversary of the Victory of the Soviet people over Nazi Germany and its satellites. Shortly afterwards we will mark the 70^th anniversary of the defeat of militarist Japan. Addressing an election meeting on February 9, 1946 Stalin said with pride: “after the object lessons of the war no skeptic any longer dares express doubts about the viability of the Soviet social system. Today we say that the Soviet … system … is the best form of organization of society…”

On the eve of the 70^th Victory anniversary the CPRF declares: the advantages of socialism have been proved by the great achievements of the victorious era. This is the legacy we will never renounce. We will multiply this legacy.

There are several concepts and models of socialism in the modern world. Having taken the relay from the Great October Revolution we position ourselves as the party of the proletarian revolution and of Soviet socialism whose foundations were laid under the leadership of Lenin and Stalin. Our party is more than 110 years old. We look at its history through the prism of contemporary tasks. Every facet of Soviet socialism that has withstood the test of time will be cherished by our successors. They will build on these achievements by their intense creative work.

Speaking about the legacy of the Soviet era let us first of all note the main features of socialism we are struggling for.

Socialism is a society of the working people in which everyone is obliged to work: “He who does not work neither shall he eat.” Such a society cannot be built on the foundations of private property. The issue of radical change of property relations is what the transition from capitalism to socialism is all about. The new society only becomes real when the working man feels responsible for his job, his workshop, factory and the country. For this it is necessary to overcome the alienation of man from labour and property. Man must participate in managing production and society. Only in this case does labour become a thing of honor, valor and heroism.

The building of a new society is not like installing a ready-made programme in a digital machine tool. It requires constant creative initiative of the masses. Addressing the All-Union Conference of Socialist Industry Workers in 1931 Stalin did not only set the task of running in 10 years the distance that advanced countries covered in 50-100 years. He identified the three key instruments of solving that task: first, self-criticism and criticism, second, the movement for rationalization of production and third, socialist emulation.

In order to continue the cause of the October Revolution and set the country on course towards socialism it is not enough to overcome the diktat of capital. One of the greatest parts of the heritage of our revolution is the experience of proletarian dictatorship that reflects the interests of the vast majority of the working people. So, the task of the future government is not only to act in the interests of the working class, but to ensure its guiding role in social and political life. Socialism is not only about social guarantees, it is also about the power of the working people.

The October 2014 Plenum of the CC CPRF made a profound review of the issue of the Party’s work in the proletarian milieu. It set concrete tasks. Persistence and energy are needed to fulfill them. Nearly half a year has passed since then. However, not all the Party branches have put the new decisions of the CC at the focus of their activities. The All-Russia Party Meeting on this topic has yet to become the key event in the life of the CPRF. Many major party committees have failed to set an example in this work.

All our comrades must understand that when private property holds sway the working class remains an oppressed and exploited class. That is why it is objectively interested in the socialist transformation of Russia. It is the main guarantor of successful implementation of the CPRF’s programmatic goal of building a renewed socialism.

I think we all understand that the Party has a vital stake in the working class. However, the decisions of the October 2014 Plenum are being put into practice in a somewhat timid way. The main reason is that the share of workers within the Party is still low and that our activists are not well equipped to work with the proletarian masses.

We should enter the collectives of workers more rapidly. It is only by forming proletarian class consciousness among the majority of workers that we will formulate that consciousness in the social strata that are close to the workers. What we vitally need is a strong alliance between the industrial working class, the proletarian workers by brain, the working peasantry, the semi-proletarian strata in the town and countryside and in the sphere of small business. In the showdown with big capital only this alliance makes it possible to neutralize the “upper strata” of the petty bourgeoisie and especially the middle-level bourgeoisie. And yet this is the decisive condition for a peaceful transition to socialism. The strength of that alliance will determine the outcome also in the event the struggle against the dictatorship of capital takes other forms.

The priceless legacy of our great Revolution is the Soviets of People’s Deputies. Lenin in his works explained the essence of the power of the Soviets. In April 1917 he stressed: The parliamentary bourgeois republic impedes and chokes independent political life of the masses,” it leaves intact the machine of oppression: the army, police and bureaucracy. The Soviets “smash and eliminate that machine”.

Soviet power has demonstrated its genuine democratic character immediately after its victory. It did so in spite of the blockade, famine and Intervention. Honest observers recognized the fact. George Lansbury , a prominent British Labour Party member, wrote in 1920 that they were trumpeting atrocities in Moscow and Petrograd, but when he was there he felt, if anything, safer than in London. He wrote that true faith was not persecuted, genuine marriage was as sacred as ever. The churches were being restored with public money. The place, he wrote, was as good as other world capitals and in many, very many ways was better. People had been told that Russia was in the hands of a band of despots. In reality, he wrote, Lenin and his associates wielded no other personal power except that conferred on them by the Soviets. They were at the head of the largest people in Europe but they ate, dressed and lived like the poorest of workers.”

Unlike the Republic of the Soviets the bourgeoisie keeps the masses away from running the affairs of the state. There are concrete figures to prove this. In the mid-1980s the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR had 975 deputies. Today the State Duma of the RF has 450 deputies and the Federation Council has 170 members. The number of MPs has dropped substantially. And one has to remember that the interests of the RSFSR population at the state level were also represented by some 900 deputies of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. However, Zhirinovsky, that loyal servant of big capital, would like to see the Duma reduced to a small group of “boyars”.

The total number of deputies of the Supreme Soviets of the autonomies and local Soviets in Russia in the 1980s exceeded 1 160 000. Today there are a little more than 250 000 deputies at all these levels, which means that 900 000 mandates have been taken away from the voters. The bourgeois regime has limited the access of Russian citizens to decision-making at the local level by almost five times.

Democracy is being truncated not only in quantitative terms. Quality is more important. The local power and self-government bodies have been almost totally “cleansed” of the representatives of the working class and the peasantry. The justification often rolled out is that professionals should govern. Yet it is precisely today that the qualification of governing personnel is deteriorating at an alarming  pace.

The programmatic task of the CPRF is to ensure broad participation of the working people in running the state through the Soviets, the trade unions, worker self-government and other bodies of direct people’s rule. To this end we should involve the masses in active social and political life on a day-to-day basis. It is necessary to struggle for every bridgehead in the bodies of power and local government. It is time to launch a massive campaign to prepare not only for the Single Voting Day in September of next year, but also for elections for the State Duma of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation. The areas of responsibility have been determined. It is important to go to the grassroots and make our case. The Communists and our supporters are equipped with all the necessary arguments for that.

Dear comrades, the Great October Revolution opened in our country the era of unique and soaring achievements. The construction projects of the prewar Five Year Plans and the cultural revolution, the victory over fascism, the world’s first atomic power plant and the sputnik, Communist Yuri Gagarin’s spaceflight, military-political parity with the USA, the creation of the commonwealth of socialist countries and the highly valuable experience of integration within the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance: each of these events will forever remain part of the history of humankind.

The exploits of the country are the sum of the exploits of concrete individuals. We should see to it that the heroism of the workers and the captains of industry, scientists and political strategists should not be forgotten. Tribute should be paid to their intellect and creative endeavor, their ingenuity and skill, and thorough strategic planning and scientific decisions.

Modern Russia inherited a powerful economy from Soviet socialism. But the current political regime has failed to maintain the standards that had been achieved. It is not even prepared to properly remember its heroes. Anti-Sovietism has become its hallmark. We Communists hold sacred the memory of the unique contribution of the Soviet people to world civilization. Our heritage is our ideological weapon in the struggle against the class enemy.

We understand that we will again have to traverse the path of the October Revolution. We will have to do it in a different way, but we will inevitably have to walk that path. Our key legacy is the unique practice of the trail-blazers of socialism. One can safely put at the top of the list the experience of restoring the war-devastated national economy. The Bolsheviks accomplished this formidable task twice.

The Civil War ended in late 1920s. The VIII All-Russia Congress of the Soviets adopted the first integrated state plan of economic development in history, GOELRO. Industry began to recover immediately. As early as 1921-1923 output doubled, the fuel crisis was overcome and the work of transport was improving. The NEP made it possible to establish normal trade between town and countryside. In 1926 industry exceeded the prewar level by 8% and power generation had increased by 80%. A bridgehead had been put in place for industrialization.

The second period of economic recovery was equally large-scale and challenging. During the Great Patriotic War the country lost 30% of its industrial potential. More than 32 000 industrial enterprises were ruined, 60% of steel-making capacity and 70% of coal-mining capacity were destroyed. But the organizing role of the AUCP(B) and mobilization of the forces of the entire Soviet people ensured a revival of industry within a short space of time. It is incredible, but by the end of 1946 the Soviet industry reached the prewar level in terms of output. In 1950 the prewar level was exceeded by 73%. Simultaneously structural changes aimed at speeding up scientific and technical progress were being implemented. The Communists must have thorough knowledge of this great experience because we are destined to apply it in practice. Capitalism, which has been restored in Russia, failed during the last quarter century even to match the economic performance indicators of 1990, which was an extremely difficult year for the Soviet system. After the counterrevolution of August 1991 the rate of economic decline became catastrophic.

The people’s patriotic forces face the challenge, like our fathers and grandfathers, of lifting the country from its knees at the Bolshevik pace. The first economic miracle of the 20^th century occurred in the Soviet Union, and not in Japan or China. The average annual rate of growth of industrial output throughout the 1930s was 16.5%, a record that has never been beaten. It can be matched only by learning to apply the mobilization methods of economic development.

The era of the Great October Revolution has bequeathed to us the unique practice of developing and implementing scientific and production programmes. Thanks to them the nuclear missile shield of our country was created within the shortest space of time. The conquest of outer space was a multi-sectoral programme of genius. In implementing it the USSR did not only win the space race but ensured the creation of new civilian technologies.

Territorial-production complexes proved to be highly effective. Russia is still enjoying the fruits of these ambitious projects. The Western Siberia oil and gas complex alone enables the country’s economy to preserve its world significance. Among the outstanding phenomena are the Bratsk Territorial-Production Complex, the Baikal-Amur Railway and of course, the pioneer of giant projects, the Urals-Kuznetsk Coal and Metallurgical Base.

The years of Soviet government saw radical changes in the country’s spiritual culture. Prior to the Great October Revolution Russia had two cultures: that of the rich and that of the muzhiks. The Soviet people created a single culture with socialist content. Its values were the values of the working people. The working man, the builder and defender of the Motherland became the main hero in literature and the arts. From Fyodor Gladkov’s novel “Cement” the tradition leads to the works of Yuri Bondarev, Valentin Rasputin and Vasily Belov. The calling cards of Soviet sculpture are the works of Ivan Shadr “The Flagstone: the Weapon of the Proletariat”, “The Worker”, “The Sower” and “The Peasant”. Vera Mukhina’s sculpture “The Worker and the Collective Farm Woman” became a vivid symbol of emancipated labour. Yevgeny Vuchetich has created great images. The artists Alexander Laktionov, Arkady Plastov, Alexander Deineka and Mitrofan Grekov have left a unique legacy.

Humanism became an inalienable feature of Soviet culture. It marks the literary works of Maxim Gorky and Konstantin Fedin, Alexei Tolstoy and Mikhail Sholokhov, Konstantin Simonov and Leonid Leonov, Konstantin Paustovsky and Vasily Shukshin. Profound humanity permeates the poetry of Alexander Tvardovsky and Yegor Isayev, the verses of Mikhail Isakovsky and Alexei Fatyanov, the music of Georgy Sviridov, Isaak Dunayevsky, Vasily Solovyov-Sedoy, Valery Gavrilin, Boris Mokrousov and Alexandra Pakhmutova. Soviet culture is so rich in talent that it is impossible to enumerate all the names.

Socialist culture has been actively helping to form a new civilization of kindness, humanity and of serving one’s people. The development of Soviet civilization was cut short during take-off. However, its achievements and its best specimens will yet help us to solve the tasks of a new transition from capitalism to socialism. That is why we cherish this legacy so ardently. It is our duty to pass it on to those who will carry forward the banner of the struggle for socialism. We are called upon to do everything possible so that the new generations of Russian youth should assimilate the spectacular achievements of the high Soviet culture.

Relying on the priceless legacy of Soviet socialism, the Communists have yet to create new large-scale projects. We have to recreate the most ambitious project of the Soviet era, the single national economy complex of the socialist Motherland.

The new generations of the followers of Lenin must above all assimilate the science of recovery and creation. They will again tailor their actions to the socialist law of planned and proportional development of the national economy. To this end it is necessary first of all to solve the all-important task of giving the country’s economy back to the people.

In putting Russia back on the socialist track the CPRF will have not only to overcome the current economic dislocation. It will have to catch up with the countries that have outstripped it. Therefore, even before the restoration period begins, we have to gain people’s trust, convince the working class, the engineers, scientists, teachers and all the working people that we are capable of being in the vanguard of major transformations. To this end we should step up the propaganda of our anti-crisis programme in every direction. We should aggressively insist on a radical change of course.

The priority measure that the CPRF proposes is to form a government of popular trust that will tackle the crisis competently  and vigorously. Among the key measures that would ensure economic growth it is called upon to carry out a ten-point plan:

1.To establish state control of currency operations and the entire banking system. To nationalize the leading banks. To make it obligatory for commodity exporters to sell at least half of their currency earnings to the state.

2.To put the Central Bank in the service of the interests of Russia. To make it obligatory for the Central Bank to issue targeted credits to the real sector of the economy. To reduce the key rate to the inflation level. To establish tight control over the actual use of the credit resources that are allocated.

3.To bring back not only profits but also assets to Russia from offshore zones on a massive scale. To ban cross-border capital movement.

4.To take the country out of the World Trade Organization. To impose a moratorium on payments towards external credit obligations until all international sanctions are lifted.

5.To form a powerful state sector in the economy, to pave its way to high technologies on the basis of the latest achievements of fundamental and applied sciences.

6. To nationalize the power industry, railway transport, oil and gas and other extractive sectors. To link access to natural resources to orders for the domestic industry. To impose a moratorium on the growth of tariffs for the products of natural monopolies. To ensure state regulation of prices for fuel and lubricants.

7.To immediately introduce control of the prices of prime necessity goods. To create a state trade sector to ensure competition with private trade companies.

8.To ensure priority state support of the agro-industrial complex. To bring federal budget expenditure on agriculture to 10% of all spending. To provide conditions for peasants to sell their products at specialized city markets.

9.To introduce state monopoly on the production and sale of alcohol-containing goods.

10.To introduce progressive tax on super-profits. To relieve the poor from paying income tax.

Each of these ten points needs to be thoroughly detailed. In order to delve into this work we must continue to have active working groups involving qualified experts. An example of close study of major problems was the recent symposium Breakthrough Technologies of the XXI Century held in St Petersburg to mark the jubilee of the world-famous scientist Zhores Alferov.

We are confident that only an immediate implementation of the set of measures proposed by the CPRF will make it possible to wrest the country from the vice of the crisis. This approach helped the Primakov-Maslyukov-Gerashchenko government to pull the country back from the edge of an abyss. These measures are asking to be used today considering the assessment of the situation that Yevgeny Primakov presented to a meeting of the Chamber of Trade and Industry in his report on the results of 2014.

Putin’s turn to a nationally oriented foreign policy has still not been backed up by measures to take the country out of the social and economic impasse. It is obvious that the Medvedev government is not coping. On the agenda is the formation of a government of popular trust.

Anti-Sovietism: the law of capitalist restoration

It has become a set pattern that as soon as the situation in Russia worsens a new spiral of anti-Sovietism and Russophobia begins. Behind every such upsurge are attempts to divert people’s attention from acute social problems. From the beginning of the 1990s anti-Soviet attacks have never stopped with various forms of slandering the Soviet way of life complementing one another. We habitually hear the liberal bourgeois moaning that Soviet power strangled individual freedom and human rights. It is regularly attacked from those who embrace White Guard patriotism. Anti-Sovietism is cherished in order to suppress socialist consciousness of the broad popular masses.

Anti-Sovietism is objectively to be expected in Russia under restored capitalism. In his 1929 book “The National Question and Leninism” Stalin proposed a concept of replacing bourgeois nations with socialist ones. He wrote: “Is it not obvious that with the disappearance of capitalism the bourgeois nations it engendered must also disappear? On the ruins of old bourgeois nations there emerge and develop new socialist nations which are more cohesive than any bourgeois nation because they are free of irreconcilable class contradictions that erode bourgeois nations, they are more nations of the whole people than any bourgeois nation.”

This was precisely the situation in the USSR. The strength of the union of socialist nations was proved by the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945. A new historical community was being born in the country. It was the Soviet people. It is not by chance that the Victory Marshal, Georgi Zhukov, wrote: “Due to the influence of the Soviet way of life, the immense educational work of the Party a new mold of man was created in our country, a man ideologically convinced of his righteous cause and deeply aware of personal responsibility for the destiny of his country.” Nations drew as close together as never in world history. It is not by chance that the collapse of Soviet power fomented national-patriotism and national-separatism. Anti-Sovietism has from the outset been leavened with bourgeois liberalism and nationalistic frenzy.

The essence of anti-Sovietism is barbaric destruction of socialist nations and their forcible transformation into bourgeois nations. To accomplish this the oligarchic pro-Western capital in Russia has to eliminate the worldview that forms the foundation of socialism. It has proved to be impossible to do it peacefully with the voluntary consent of the popular masses. Even after Soviet society was destroyed its values are alive in our historical memory, in the national mentality of Russians, Tatars, Yakuts and other peoples of Russia.

A lot has recently been said about the Russian world. This is not surprising because Russophobia has for a quarter of a century been hurting the sense of national dignity of the people that forms the core of our state. It emanates from liberals who are calling the shots not only in economics but also in the cultural sphere, in the media, cinema, theatre and literature. The problem has become even more sensitive with the breakout of the Civil War in Ukraine where Russophobia is one of the ideological weapons of Banderovites.

All this is true. But it is equally important to speak about the Soviet world, the world of collectivism and internationalism of the working people, of comradely mutual help and mutual assistance. This world has not disappeared in Russia, Byelorussia or Ukraine or in other union republics. The memory of the great victory of the Soviet people over German fascism prompted the volunteers, the citizens of Lugansk and Donetsk, to join the life-and-death struggle against Banderovites. The people of Russia are preserving Soviet features in their national mentality and culture. This is today the main cause of Russophobia which has donned the garb of anti-Sovietism.

Soviet collectivism has not disappeared. It manifests itself in various forms of comradely cooperation. There exist people’s enterprises. Associations in the sphere of semi-proletarian small business exist. Collectivism manifests itself in the work of artists to revive Soviet culture: music, drama and literature. Proletarians are learning to uphold their rights. Trade unions are appearing that are challenging capital. Political forms of the struggle for socialism are offered by the CPRF and a large block of people’s patriotic forces that includes the Leninist Communist Youth League of the RF, the All-Russian Women’s Union – The Hope of Russia, the Children of War and Russky Lad movements, RUSO, the International Union of Soviet Officers, the Movement in Support of the Army and a whole range of trade unions.

We are a party of Soviet internationalists. The CPRF has mobilized its best forces in aid of embattled Donbass – Russians and Tatars, Bashkirs and Chechens, Ossetians and Kalmyks, Chuvashis and Jews. In this way we are actively uniting our supporters from across the multinational Russia.

Soviet internationalism is alive. It helps the CPRF to continue the struggle for reviving the union state of working people. We are tackling this historic task together with fraternal Communist parties which are members of the UCP-CPSU. All of us – Soviet Communists – are responsible for preserving the values of socialism in the historical memory of our peoples, in their national consciousness. One of our most important missions is to prevent the transformation of the socialist nations of the former USSR into bourgeois nations of the CIS countries.

The people cherish the values of Soviet socialism. This was highlighted by the television series that had been running for many months, such as “The Name of Russia”, “The Judgment of Time” and “The Historical Process”. The Liberals who initiated these broadcasts have miscalculated. Time and again mass consciousness ruined the hopes of anti-Sovieteers and administered a mighty rebuff to the dyed-in-the-wool Russophobes.

The potential for the revival of socialist values among our people is great. It is our duty as communists to realize that potential. The challenge is formidable. The process of the formation of bourgeois nations is achieving some success for the ruling capital. Anti-Sovietism in Russia is yielding its poisoned fruit.

For a quarter of a century the Soviet way of life has been branded as a herd-like, barrack-room system that enslaves the individual. Private propertied individualism is passed off for personal freedom. Capital needs precisely this kind of freedom, the freedom to seek material gain and increase wealth, the freedom of moral and intellectual license. It is the freedom of a consumer who seeks pleasure without burdening his mind or conscience with thoughts about social good. Such freedom strengthens the power of capital and guarantees its spiritual and not only economic dominance.

During a quarter of a century a powerful anti-culture industry has been created, the “mass culture” of show business, casinos, thrillers and pornographic reads, films replete with violence, horror and perversion. This stream changes the life and attitudes of many people promoting the mentality of fast living. The cult of the crude power of money penetrates both the luxurious apartment of an oligarch and the modest abode of a worker. Not to think, not to feel pricks of conscience, not to create, but to possess money that “can do everything” – this is the credo of the vulgar bourgeois consumer. Militant individualism is backed up by group egoism which affects not only oligarchs and corrupt officials, but high-paid public sector workers, members of the artistic elite, “the workers’ aristocracy” and trade union bureaucrats. Group egoism has forever been used by big capital in its interests.

The revival of socialism poses a mortal danger to capital. That is why it dreams of destroying all things Soviet: the economy and the social system, science and culture, everything that has determined the values of socialist nations. It is not surprising that all the reforms in Russia since August 1991 have been destructive in character. The restoration of capitalism is an anti-historical and reactionary phenomenon. Anti-Sovietism is an inevitable feature of this anti-history. It is inevitable when a country’s development towards socialism is violently stopped.

Isn’t the destruction of the world’s best education system an absurdity? Is it not evidence of reaction and obscurantism? Science is deprived of its role of society’s productive force, even as calls are trumpeted for innovation. This is a travesty of common sense. The reason for this aggressive savagery is that the school, the higher education institution and science in the Soviet country sought to mold a creative personality. A critically thinking personality poses a danger to capital. It needs people with utilitarian thinking, robots programmed to work in sweatshops. Capital needs an obedient personality that is spiritually enslaved and easy to control, with a narrow set of knowledge and skills, a personality that produces surplus value. The bourgeois Russian school is based on a class division of studentss.

To turn the school into a factory that churns out primitive consumers – this is the essence of the education reform with its Unified State Examination and new curricula. But capital is unable to quickly bring the education process to a common denominator. School teachers and university professors who are loyal to the traditions of the Soviet education that develops the personality continue their creative quests. It is our task to popularize their work, to unite them in the public movement “Education for All”. We should more vigorously seek to create Komsomol and Young Pioneer Organizations in which children and young people go through a school of civic and patriotic education.

Today anti-Sovietism is again on the sharp end of events. Russia has been confronted with a formidable challenge. Seventy years after the Second World War the USA and its satellites are using Nazism to achieve their geopolitical goals. The West has kindled a fratricidal fire in Ukraine. The citizens of a fraternal country are being exposed to Russophobic-anti-Soviet poison. Monuments to Lenin, symbols of Russian and Soviet history and culture are being destroyed.

The marriage between anti-Sovietism and Russophobia is more than 90 years old. Since the socialist revolution in Russia the West has seen a double threat emanating from our country. It was afraid of socialism as an alternative to the capitalist world order. The horror was multiplied by the fact that the country calling for a new world is the largest country on the planet.

Western imperialists still shudder recalling how more than half a century ago our country blocked their path towards world dominance. We will always be on the receiving end of attempts to take revenge for industrialization and for building a mighty socialist power, for the victory in May 1945 and for Yuri Gagarin’s historic spaceflight. For achieving nuclear missile parity and for helping the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America who have thrown off the colonial yoke. The coveted goal of Western propaganda is to erase the memory of socialism’s great achievements.

The USSR could not be defeated by force of arms and it could not be strangled by sanctions. But the “fifth column” of anti-Soviet traitors helped to undermine it. The wave of Russophobia and anti-Sovietism contributed to the demise of the USSR and led to the bloody October of 1993. The charred House of the Soviets in Moscow was a harbinger of the Odessa massacre and the punitive actions in Donbass. Supported by the USA,  Banderovites are already waging war against all of us in Novorossia. Unless they get a fitting rebuff, NATO bases may appear near Kharkov.

Russia is targeted not only by a diplomatic and economic offensive. An information war has been unleashed against it. Among its tasks is to deprive us of our heroic past that can inspire people to work towards a better future. In spite of all this, anti-Sovieteers of every stripe are enjoying a comfortable life in Russia. Revealing their ideological kinship with Banderovites they besmirch the achievements of the Soviet era. Not only in Ukraine but in this country too the Soviet historical and cultural landmarks are coming under attack. There are calls for destroying the Lenin Mausoleum and the necropolis at the Kremlin wall. Government representatives often come out for dismantling monuments. Television channels lend the airwaves to aggressive Russophobes and anti-Sovieteers. Nikolai Svadinze uses taxpayers’ money to churn out his pseudo-documentary serials.

Contrary to historical justice, the government has developed a grandiose programme of celebrating that notorious anti-Sovieteer, Solzhenitsyn. And this at a time when jubilees are approaching of truly great masters of culture. These include 200 years since the birth of Ivan Turgenev, 100 years since the birth of Konstantin Simonov, and 100 years since the birth of Georgy Sviridov.

The bacillus of anti-Sovietism causes the authorities to cover the Mausoleum with drapes during celebrations in Red Square. The Lenin Mausoleum has witnessed great events. It saw the parade on November 7, 1941. The banners of defeated Hitler armies were thrown at its feet in 1945. Veterans are proud of it. And we, the heirs of the victorious heroes, are proud of it. We are categorically against coyly hiding the truth of history behind plywood screens on the day of the 70^th anniversary of the Great Victory.

Anti-Sovietism is dangerous for Russia. It helps to destroy the country’s productive forces, the working people and science. It targets national culture and contributes to turning the nations of Russia into bourgeois nations of the colonial type. In forcibly changing national consciousness it replaces Soviet values, the humanistic traditions of  Russian culture with surrogates of the decadent bourgeois culture of the West. It is inadmissible to keep silent in the face of this situation. My open letter to the citizens of Russia calls on everyone to join the struggle against Russophobia and anti-Sovietism.

The members of the Russian Communist Party are well aware that socialism is impossible if it is not rooted in the national soil, in the great cultural heritage created over the centuries. The best achievements of past eras are the basis for the emergence of the new socialist culture.

Anti-Sovietism is the banner of traitors and defeatists. It is pushing our country into an abyss. Those who inspire and commission anti-Sovietism today are the same foreign political forces as during the Cold War with the USSR. The enemies of socialism have pushed our country to the path of degradation and disintegration. But they would not stop. The masks are off. They do not need an imperial or a socialist or even a bourgeois Russia.

To protect its right to a future it is necessary to promote the achievements of our culture. It is necessary to bring back the spectacular decades and festivals of friendship of the peoples. It is necessary to support the talented people who are custodians of the best traditions. It is necessary to publish a 100-volume collection of Russian classics and send it to every library and school. And finally and most importantly: it is necessary to eradicate the dry rot of anti-Sovietism that is corroding the institutions of power.

We are not naïve people. We understand that the ruling regime needs anti-Sovietism. It helps to cover up and justify the destructive policy of the oligarchic capital. But it is already obvious that Russophobia is a weapon against our country. Both those who defend Russia and those who try to destroy it know this. Communists should be aggressive in getting across the message that Russophobia and anti-Sovietism are pursuing the same task.

A true patriot today has no right to relinquish a single accomplishment of our thousand-year-old history. Forming the same front with us in the struggle for Russia are the armies of Kievan Rus and the regiments of the Moscow state, the Zemstvo volunteers and Suvorov’s “wonder warriors,” the soldiers of Borodino and the Red Guard heroes, the Red Army soldiers who defeated foreign invaders and their White Guard accomplices and the valiant soldiers of the Great Patriotic War. Those who are waging war on Soviet history are waging war on Russia regardless of the colour of their banners.

The people cannot be united by fostering White Guard patriotism. Such attempts will merely split society. It is not by chance that history has destroyed the bourgeois patriotism of White anti-Soviet forces. It was the patriotism of the country estates of the gentry, of exploitation by land owners and capitalists. As long as society is rent apart by class antagonisms White and Red will never be brothers. Today it is no secret that the organizers of Bolotnaya rallies carrying white ribbons never once condemned the vandals in Ukraine who pull down the monuments to Lenin, desecrate the monuments to those who defeated fascism and other Soviet-era heroes. They scream about repressions by the government but they do not protest when Communists are victims of repression. It happened to our comrades more than once. It is happening today to Vladimir Bessonov.

The CPRF is stating with confidence that the place of anti-Sovietism is in the rubbish heap of stale and harmful ideas. It should not poison our lives. The reunification of the Crimea with Russia has confirmed that our people want to breathe clear and fresh air. The country needs a healthy atmosphere of pride for the deeds of ancestors, faith in the future, in creative endeavor and progress.

We will persistently argue our case. We will steadily follow this path. All the others need to make up their minds. It is clear that in a “special situation” not everyone will be able to leave and live on money that has been stolen and stashed away in offshore zones. Some will have to choose between upholding national independence without anti-Sovietism or a real possibility of facing the Hague tribunal. It may be that for them patriotism would be only a tactical move. We should make sure that this is in the interests of the strategic goals of preserving and reviving our country.

Averting a national catastrophe

Dear comrades,

A party that comes out for building a renewed socialism must determine whether the features of the era when Lenin led his party in a victorious socialist revolution are still relevant today?

The CPRF Programme says in black and white that we live in a society of restored capitalism. The October 2014 Plenum of the Party’s Central Comittee described it as “regressive and parasitic, oligarchic and comprador” capitalism that is “not viable and is historically doomed”.

Opinion surveys show that Russian citizens want to live in a society in which the main value is social justice. Almost half of respondents give this answer. Nearly 36% of respondents dream of a return to the national traditions by which they usually mean the traditions of the Soviet era. One in every three respondents wants to see a future in which Russia is a great power. Only 13% pin their hopes on the “free market and private property”. This is not surprising: the future that our compatriots long for cannot be achieved as long as power is in the hands of big business.

Russia is again in a tangle of acute contradictions. The main contradiction is between labour and capital. Restoration of capitalism is accompanied by impoverishment – both relative and absolute – of the working people. According to the RAS Sociology Institute one-third of our compatriots live in poverty. Most of these people have jobs but their wages are not living wages. The gap between the groups of Russians that have the highest and the lowest incomes is 40 times. This is a much wider gap than in Tsarist Russia.

The privations and poverty of the oppressed classes are evident. Surveys have shown that during the past 20 years employment in the public sector has diminished significantly and the social security of the employees of private enterprises has diminished. Unemployment is rising. First Deputy Prime Minister Shuvalov, Minister of Economic Development Ulyukayev, Labour Minister Topilin and President of the Central Bank Nabiullina all openly warn that unemployment may rise. Thus the authorities admit that further impoverishment of the working people is inevitable.

Among the age-old contradictions the antagonisms between the peasants and the land owners, between the rural bourgeoisie and the peasant community have disappeared. However, the latest rural census in 2006 revealed the existence of acute contradictions within the stratified peasantry. At the time of the census there were more than 550,000 hired workers who were exploited by private land owners.

The land issue is becoming ever more acute. On the one hand, millions of hectares of arable land have been abandoned and taken out of cultivation. On the other hand, as a result of the forcibly introduced purchase and sale of land there is growing stratification in rural areas in terms of the size of plots of land. More than 17% of peasant households have no land and 43% have small plots of land. At the same time there have appeared huge private estates of tens of thousands of hectares.

The nationalities issue was very acute in pre-Revolutionary Russia. It was again exacerbated by the counter-revolutionary coup of 1991-1993. We also see inter-religious contradictions. According to sociologists, only one-fifth of the population are not worried about religious extremism. 42% feel concern about the issue and nearly 40% are very worried or afraid.

The antagonism between town and countryside that characterized Tsarist Russia has transformed itself into acute contradictions between different types of communities. Contradictions between regions and between different parts of the country are very strong.

Thus the contradictions between the “lower” and the “upper” strata in modern Russia are becoming more acute. But the question is, are the “upper strata” able to rule in the old way? Today they probably still are. But their capabilities are stretched to the limit.

Surveys have shown that 80% of our fellow countrymen are ready to give up food that comes from Western countries and 55% are ready to give up travel to the European Union countries and the USA. But that means that they are ready to give up what may be called “luxuries”. A very different answer has been given to the suggestion that Russian citizens should tighten their belts: 82% are against tax rises and 84% reject the freezing of wages and pensions.

In the context of economic crisis the situation of the working class in Russia continues to deteriorate. Impoverishment of the “lower orders” continues. Objective conditions are ripening for a revolutionary situation. However, as Lenin warned, “a revolution may be ripe, but the movers of the revolution may not have enough strength to accomplish it – in this case society decays and the decay may last for decades”.

What is happening in this country shows that Russia is already in a stage of decay. The CPRF, acting in and outside parliament, seeks to stop the disintegration of society brought about by the restoration of capitalism. This work is needed to protect the country and to save its working people. But practice shows that the ills of capitalism cannot be cured from within it. Therefore our position remains unchanged: “socialism is the way out of the crisis”. Only the proletariat can play the role of the advanced class “capable of saving Russia from decay”.

The authorities have imposed a tacit taboo on the theme of the working class. Those who are not engaged in industrial production may get the impression that the working class has disappeared. This is exactly what the regime counts on. Those members of the patriotic groups who have fallen under the influence of new-fangled theories of post-industrial and information society are playing up to it. With the nonchalance of a Khlestakov they declare that the proletariat has disappeared, that the class struggle is fading and is being replaced with the national liberation struggle.

But if there is no proletarian class, there is no one to exploit and there is nowhere to derive surplus value from. How then is capital generated and where do capitalists come from? But it is perhaps futile to argue with self-styled theoreticians who pass off absurdity for the truth. All their speculations amount to ideological defeatism in the face of big capital. Bourgeois ideologies have always tried to keep the workers away from a class analysis of facts and social phenomena. Capital remembers well the lessons of history and is afraid of the working class which may become its undertaker.

In order to firmly rely on the masses of working people we Communists must at all times know exactly the level of protest sentiments in the country and understand what position we are in and from what position we are launching our offensive. At the end of last year scientists from the RAS Sociology Institute published a report on the problems of mass politics. It notes that 70% of respondents said they had political views. The most numerous group – 75% - are advocates of various models of socialism. This is the social base with which we should work closely. This majority represents real opposition to comprador capitalism and its political regime. Left-wing, right-wing and “middle-of-the-road” liberals accounted for a mere 8% of the respondents. Anarchists, conservatives and environmentalists accounted for 7-8%.

The survey is the best answer to those who are still bemoaning the absence or passivity of the proletarians. And yet 29% of workers declare that they feel sympathy for those who actively take part in rallies. Another 29% of workers say that their positions are similar to those who do not rule out participation in political actions. Activism is much less evident among the intelligentsia and is almost 2.5 times less than among civil servants and “white collar” workers.

Thus more and more workers are ready to take part in protest actions. This improves the soil for our influence on the proletarian masses. We should make the most of this trend. The previous plenary session of the CC has issued specific instructions to this end. The city and regional party committees have been recommended to take on board the methods of “strongholds” of influence on the working class. Specific enterprises must become such strongholds. There needs to be active protection of the interests of hired workers, and a fight against unfair dismissals and for greater proletarian solidarity. Before this year is out we will conduct a review of how the decisions are being implemented by each organization.

The task of the CPRF is to develop the working class movement and to combine it with socialist ideology. The current state of affairs makes it incumbent upon us to increase step-by-step our day-to-day work among the grassroots, to know the needs of the working people of various trades and age, to find a common language with religious believers and atheists, to convince the waverers and to make those who have lost their way change their minds. If we neglect the organizing role of mass protests we may find ourselves sidelined politically, if we are active we will bring closer the time of socialist transformation of our Motherland.

Four forces have clashed in modern Russia. First, the rapacious oligarchy and the power that expresses its interests. Their political bulwark is United Russia. Second, the liberal pro-Western bourgeoisie which is close to them in terms of their class orientation. They rely on groups of oligarchs who appeared during the Yeltsin era of favouritism. Its centres are small parties such as the Party of Progress (A.Navalny), PARNAS (V.Ryzhkov, M.Kasyanov), Solidarnost, etc. The third force is petty bourgeoisie whose numbers tend to increase at times of economic crises. Its leading political representatives are Just Russia and the LDPR. The fourth force is the working class and its allies whom the CPRF is called upon to lead.

Such multi-polar structures are characteristic of “peaceful” political life. But events in Ukraine have shown that when things come to direct confrontation such polyhedrons straighten out. There remain only two poles, two centres of attraction. They have to neutralize other social political forces. If political activism in Russia rises, the petty bourgeoisie will, as usual, find itself on the sidlines. Only two forces will have a real claim to power.

The first version: The two poles will be the united bourgeoisie and the CPRF-led united proletariat. This is a chance for Russia to be back on the path of socialist creative endeavor. This was the strategy of the Bolsheviks during the Great October Socialist Revolution which brought them victory.

Second version: Two competing groups of oligarchs will clash in the struggle for power. The difference between them is only in the methods used to ensure the dictatorship of capital. The victory of either of these can establish a regime with “brown spots”: when capital finds bourgeois democratic methods insufficient it opts for fascist methods. This is what happened in Ukraine.

For the CPRF this means that it cannot regard any of the big capital groups as its allies or fellow travelers. The real alternative to the counter-revolutionary forces must be the working class and the CPRF. As Stalin maintained, renunciation by the Communist Party of the struggle to lead millions, its line for a coalition with the bourgeoisie corresponds to a Menshevik strategy. Bolshevism chooses to give the role of “hegemon of the revolutionary movement” to the proletariat.

The party of the heirs to the October Revolution cannot afford to trail behind the events. We will cope with our historical role only if we act as the vanguard of the struggle for socialism. The CPRF has long passed its formative stage. It now has to scale new heights. The party is called upon to win over the broad masses of workers and peasants. Characterizing such a situation I.V.Stalin noted: “The party at this period is not as weak as in the previous period; it is becoming a serious factor as a moving force. Now … it becomes … an instrument for guiding the struggle of the masses in overthrowing the power of capital: the Party focuses its attention not on the party itself, but on the millions of the population.”

Decay of the country was how Lenin described the state of Russia a hundred years ago, and it is still relevant today. The working class was the leading force of the Great October Revolution that prevented a national catastrophe. The key task of the CPRF is to unite in its ranks the best representatives of this class. They alone are capable of waging an uncompromising struggle against capital. Only with them will the Party be able to protect the country from the threat of a new national disaster.

A banner for all times

Dear comrades, friends, fellow fighters

Almost a hundred years after the victory of the Great October Revolution it is becoming ever more evident that our revolution cannot be seen as a phenomenon confined just to Russia. The Russian revolution made an imprint on the processes on world scale. The socialist proletarian revolution changed the destinies of mankind.

In his 1920 work “Left-Wing Communism: Infantile Disorder” Lenin wrote: “Some of the main features of our revolution have not only local, not only national-specific, not only Russian, but international significance.”

Under the influence of the October Revolution all the Soviet people understood and identified themselves with the great slogan of Marx and Engels. “Proletarians of all lands, unite!”. The Russian Bolsheviks have taken it up and put it into practice.

The CPRF is loyal to this slogan today.

Yes, the Bolsheviks believed in victory when they called the masses to arise in October of 1917. But they have always regarded the Russian Revolution as part of the world struggle between Labour and Capital. However, the Leninists resolutely rejected Trotsky’s idea of turning the Great October Revolution into a bundle of sticks to ignite a world fire. The Bolsheviks had a much deeper understanding of the international character of the proletarian revolution. Addressing the III All-Russia Congress of the Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies, Lenin said: “Our Socialist Republic of the Soviets will stand firm like a torch of international socialism and an example to all the working masses. Over there it is fighting, war and bloodshed, over here it is a genuine policy of peace and the socialist republic of the Soviets”.

Three days before the opening of the Congress of the Soviets Lenin wrote: “The interests of socialism are above the interests of the right of nations to self-determination.” Firmly adhering to this approach Stalin maintained that the elimination of national oppression is unthinkable “without breaking off with imperialism, without overthrowing ‘one’s own’ national bourgeoisie and without the working masses taking power themselves”. This principle is still relevant today. For the CPRF supporting the working people of Crimea and Novorossia is an act of solidarity with their struggle against imperialism, against Banderovites, against the right-wing nationalistic Ukrainian bourgeoisie. Our solidarity can only be complete if the working people resolutely seek to gain power in our country. These are the behests of Lenin and Stalin.

Protecting the gains of the October Revolution was an international affair. The land of the Soviets was assisted by the revolutionary struggle of the international proletariat. A great tradition was born in Russia during the Civil War. During that time thousands of internationalist fighters had joined the Red Army. They included Serbs, Hungarians, Czechs, Poles and Chinese. Later history was made by international brigades that defended the Spanish Republic in 1936-1938. That glorious tradition is still alive today. Its frontline now runs in the proletarian region of Donbass.

The legacy of the Great October Revolution includes many lessons of international solidarity. Beginning from the middle of the last century many new associations joined that work. They include the World Peace Council, the International Federation of Resistance Fighters, the World Federation of Trade Unions, the Women’s International Democratic Federation, the World Federation of Democratic Youth and the International Association of Democratic Lawyers. We are preparing to welcome representatives of these organizations in Moscow soon in order to hold a forum to mark the 70^th anniversary of the victory of the Soviet people in the Great Patriotic War.

The international significance of the Great October Socialist Revolution is vast. It laid the foundations of a new world. Soviet Russia offered the planet an outstanding experience of socialist creative work. The Red Banner of the Great October Revolution has become the banner of the working people of the whole world, the banner of truth and justice.

In the years of the fight against fascism our Red Banner inspired the heroic defenders of Moscow, Leningrad and Stalingrad. It saw the first victory fireworks to mark the liberation of Oryol and Belgorod. In May 1945 this flag soared over the defeated Berlin to become the main symbol of the Great Victory. This is a banner for all times.

The legacy of Soviet socialism is alive. It is alive in the romantic Cuban Revolution, in the outstanding quests of Che Guevara and Salvador Allende, Daniel Ortega and Hugo Chavez, in the present-day successes of China and Vietnam, in the progressive development of the unassuming and industrious Byelorussia, and in the “reddening”  Latin America.

The Russian Communists are proud of their history. Our struggle today draws on the diverse and impressive experience of different units of the international left-wing movement. At the sources of that experience is the dawn of a new life born in October 1917. This rich experience is our great heritage. The achievements of the Soviet era are our stainless steel weapon, our lodestar and the foundation of our new accomplishments.

Our truth gives us confidence that the forces of creation, peace and progress will prevail over the forces of evil.

Ours is the right cause, victory will be ours.

Fuente: CPRF/Solidnet/PrensaPopularSolidaria
http://prensapopular-comunistasmiranda.blogspot.com
Correo: pcvmirandasrp@gmail.com