Stalin Joseph - Leninism

by

COMRADE DMITRIEV,

Your letter of January 14, 1927, to the Bolshevik, on the subject of the workers and peasants government was sent to me at the Central Committee for reply. I am answering after some delay owing to the fact that I have been very busy, for which I beg you to forgive me.

1. This question cannot be put as some comrades put it: is the workers and peasants government a fact, or is it only an agitational slogan? We cannot say that, although in reality there is no such thing as a workers and peasants government, nevertheless, we may talk about a workers and peasants government as an agitational slogan. This would suggest that our Party is capable of issuing intrinsically false slogans, slogans that are actually unsubstantial, in which the Party itself does not believe, but which the Party, nevertheless, puts into circulation in order to deceive the masses. Socialist-Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, and bourgeois-democrats may act like that, since contradiction between word and deed and deceit of the masses constitute one of the chief weapons of these moribund Parties. But never and under no circumstances can our Party put the question in this way; for our Party is a Marxist Party, a Leninist Party, a Party that is on the ascendant, a Party which draws its strength from the fact that its words do not contradict its deeds, that it does not deceive the masses, that it tells the masses only the truth and bases its policy not on demagogy, but on a scientific analysis of class forces. The question must be put in this way: either we have no such thing as a workers and peasants government, in which case the slogan workers and peasants government must be discarded as a superfluous and false slogan, or we have a workers and peasants government in fact, and the existence of that government corresponds with the state of class forces, in which case the slogan of a workers and peasants government is a genuine and revolutionary slogan. Either one or the other. We have to choose, Comrade Dmitriev.