`Lenin's Final Fight' addresses key issues in fight to replace capitalism with socialism.

Published below is the preface to "Lenin's Final Fight," a new book from Pathfinder Press. It will be available in bookstores at the end of April. Reprinted by permission of Pathfinder.

Five years after the victory of the October 1917 revolution in Russia, Bolshevik leader Vladimir Ilyich Lenin waged his final political fight. The stakes were very high. Against mounting odds Lenin fought to maintain the proletarian internationalist course that had prepared the Communist Party to lead the exploited producers to power over the landlords and capitalists and enabled them to begin building a workers state. He fought for a course to unite the workers and peasants of Russia and of the nations long oppressed under tsarism into a voluntary federation of soviet republics.

This book documents Lenin's battle in his own words.

It is not a history book. The political questions addressed by Lenin deal with the most decisive piece of unfinished business in front of those who produce the wealth of the world and make possible culture: they deal with the worldwide struggle, opened by the Bolshevik-led revolution nearly eighty years ago, to replace the dictatorship of a tiny minority of exploiting capitalist families with the dictatorship of the proletariat-"political power wielded by the majority of the population," as Lenin put it in 1919, a "democracy for the masses, for the working people, for the factory workers and small peasants."(1) The outcome of this unfinished struggle will determine whether the future of the world will be one of capitalist-imposed fascism and war or the transition to a communist society based on human solidarity and collective labor.

How to resolve these bitterly contested issues has been at the center of every modern revolution in which the toilers have toppled the landlords and capitalists from political power and established workers and farmers governments. These questions remain relevant today to the socialist revolution in Cuba-the first revolution since the Bolsheviks to be headed by a communist leadership that consciously uses state power in an effort to defend and advance the interests of the working class.

The revolutionary government that came to power in Russia in October 1917 was based on councils of workers, peasants, and soldiers delegates called soviets, the Russian word for "council." Having overthrown the monarchy and political power of the bourgeoisie, the young Soviet republic immediately acted to negotiate an end to Russia's involvement in the imperialist-organized slaughter of World War I. It encouraged the peasants to expropriate the landlords' estates and distribute the nationalized land to be worked by the tillers themselves. It repudiated tsarist debts to imperialist governments and bankers. It institutionalized separation of church and state. It asserted the full political rights of women, and initiated steps to advance the equality of women in social life.

The Soviet republic organized the working class in Petrograd, Moscow, and elsewhere to take increasing control over the production and distribution of goods and the organization of work in capitalist- and state-owned factories, mines, and mills. The new government set free the peoples subject to Russian oppression in the former tsarist empire and established their right to national self- determination. Working people from the Ukraine to Azerbaijan, from Belorussia to Mongolia, were inspired by what workers and peasants in Russia were achieving and rose in revolt to link up with the workers and peasants republic.

By early 1918, forces loyal to the tsar, landlords, and capitalists had launched a civil war to overthrow the revolution. The imperialist powers-from London and Paris to Washington and Tokyo-soon intervened militarily on the side of the counterrevolution.

As the civil war deepened in 1918, the Communist Party and Soviet government backed initiatives by the working class to stop mounting sabotage of production by factory owners and other exploiters, culminating in the expropriation of the big majority of the remaining capitalists by the end of that year. The workers and peasants government also imposed a series of emergency policies that became known as "war communism" to mobilize labor and scarce industrial and agricultural resources to defeat the counterrevolution. These measures included compulsory requisitioning of a surplus portion of peasants' grain in order to feed soldiers at the front and workers in the cities. By the close of 1920 the Soviet government had won the war. But the war had taken a massive, bloody toll on the lives of the most class-conscious workers and devastated the countryside, where the majority of peasants had backed the Soviet government to prevent the return of the landlords.

Given an impulse by the workers and peasants victory in Russia in 1917, a revolutionary wave swept across Europe from 1918 through 1920, and anti-imperialist uprisings were spurred in Asia and elsewhere in the colonial world. In March 1919, in the midst of the civil war and imperialist intervention in Russia, the Communist International (Comintern) was launched under Bolshevik leadership, attracting parties and fighters the world over who sought to emulate the revolutionary accomplishments of workers and peasants in the Soviet republic.

By the end of 1920, however, the revolutionary workers movement had sustained defeats in Germany, Hungary, and Italy. No new soviet republics had been consolidated anywhere outside the boundaries of the old tsarist empire.

When the civil war was over, coal production and rail transport, the sinews of industry, had declined to 30 percent of prewar levels in Russia. Overall factory production in 1920 was a third of the prewar rate, and steel output in 1921 was a mere 5 percent of 1913 production. Agricultural production was also down severely. Grain output in 1920 and 1921 was about 50 percent of the prewar average. In 1921 millions died of starvation.(2)

In a resolution drafted for discussion at the Third Congress of the Communist International in mid-1921, Lenin summed up the revolution's international position by pointing out that "although it is far stronger, imperialism has proved unable to strangle Soviet Russia and has been obliged for the time being to grant her recognition, or semi-recognition, and to conclude trade agreements with her. The result is a state of equilibrium which, although highly unstable and precarious, enables the socialist republic to exist-not for long, of course-within the capitalist encirclement."

As for the alignment of class forces inside Russia at the close of the civil war, Lenin said in the resolution, "The alliance between the small peasants and the proletariat can become a correct and stable one from the socialist standpoint only when the complete restoration of transport and large- scale industry enables the proletariat to give the peasants, in exchange for food, all the goods they need for their own use and for the improvement of their farms."(3)

In face of this situation both internationally and inside the Soviet republic, the Bolsheviks launched the New Economic Policy (NEP) in early 1921. In March the Soviet government decreed the end of requisitioning of peasant grain surpluses and replaced it with a tax in kind. That is, peasants were required to provide the government a percentage of their harvest, fixed by a sliding scale to favor the small peasants as well as those who produced most efficiently. The government authorized a private market, first for farm products and later for other commodities. Privately owned enterprises were permitted in rural and small-scale industry. Foreign capitalists were encouraged to invest in the Soviet republics by acquiring "concessions" that they would operate under strict government control, although very few responded to this offer.

In order to restore production and trade, runaway inflation had to be reined in. The government sharply cut back the minting of rubles, reduced state expenditures, and moved toward the stable currency required for state accounting and planning. State enterprises were increasingly weaned from government subsidies and had to live off revenues from sales and attempt to turn a surplus.

By early 1922 the Soviet working class and revolutionary government had scored modest but important successes through the NEP in regaining the confidence of the peasantry, while increasing overall economic production, and in particular the availability of light industrial products that could be traded for food supplies. These events set the scene for this book, which opens with Lenin's March 1922 political report to the Eleventh Congress of the Russian Communist Party.

The opening rounds of Lenin's final political fight took place in September 1922. This book follows that fight up to the time of the severe stroke in early March 1923 that brought Lenin's political life to an end. Throughout this period, his deteriorating health repeatedly interrupted his activity. After a stroke in late May 1922 that paralyzed his right hand and leg and impaired his speech, and a brief recovery that summer, Lenin suffered several relapses in the closing months of 1922 and early 1923. He died a year later in January 1924.

The chapters in this book present, chronologically, the articles, letters, speeches, resolutions, and memos by Lenin that were part of this fight. From December 21, 1922, until his last letter of March 6, 1923, everything that Lenin is known to have written is included here. In addition, writings by other Bolshevik leaders have been included to the degree these documents figured prominently in the battle and help the reader follow its evolution. The editor has provided chapter titles highlighting an aspect of the struggle during a particular time period, but each chapter contains material by Lenin on not just that aspect but on the range of questions central to the communist course he was fighting to defend and advance.

Over the years following Lenin's death, an increasingly privileged bureaucratic caste consolidated its brutal hold on the state and party apparatus and carried out a political counterrevolution against the proletarian internationalist policies around which Lenin had organized the Bolshevik leadership of the Soviet workers and peasants republic, Communist Party, and Communist International. Joseph Stalin emerged as the despotic arbiter for that petty-bourgeois social layer, and his murderous regime suppressed many of Lenin's writings contained in these pages for more than three decades.

A few years after Stalin's death in 1953 a section of his heirs, for whom Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev was the spokesman, sought to distance themselves from some of the Stalin regime's most infamous crimes. Only then were many of these writings by Lenin acknowledged and published in the Soviet Union. Some had not been available anywhere since the mid-1920s.

As long-suppressed items were finally translated and printed in the fourth English-language edition of Lenin's Collected Works, published in Moscow between 1960 and 1970, however, they were broken up and scattered in volumes 33, 36, 42, and 45. Most of the material by Lenin in this collection has been taken from that Moscow edition, but it is presented here chronologically as the fight actually unfolded.

In addition, a few items by Lenin from this period have never before been published in English and appear for the first time in this collection. One item-the March 1923 report prepared for Lenin on the Dzerzhinsky commission investigation into events in the republic of Georgia-was kept secret by Moscow until the collapse of the Stalinist apparatus in the former USSR in 1991. The final section of that report, "On the Conclusions of the Dzerzhinsky Commission," is published in appendix 1 of this volume for the first time in any language.

Footnotes about events referred to in the text have been included. For each item the source and related information appear as the first footnote. A glossary containing names of individuals, organizations, and publications has been compiled. A list of abbreviations and initials used in the book and a chronology of important events are also included.

In items by Lenin taken from the English-language edition of his Collected Works, spelling and punctuation have been changed to conform with current U.S. usage. A few translation changes have been made on the basis of a comparison with the fifth Russian-language edition of Lenin's writings.

Translations from Russian for this volume are by Sonja Franeta, Jeff Hamill, Doug Hord, Brian Pearce, John Riddell, and Andrew Rodomar. John Riddell did much of the research and editorial preparation on this book before its final compilation and editing.

Chapter divisions, titles, and footnotes were prepared by the editor.

GEORGE FYSON
APRIL 3, 1995

2. A useful summary of the first five years of the Soviet workers and peasants republic is contained in the two-volume series by Farrell Dobbs, Revolutionary Continuity: The Early Years (1848-1917) (New York: Pathfinder, 1980) and Revolutionary Continuity: Birth of the Communist Movement (1918-1922) (New York: Pathfinder, 1983).

3. Lenin, "Theses for a Report on the Tactics of the R.C.P.," CW, vol. 32, pp. 453-61.  
 
 
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