At the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets in October 1917 Ilyich said that the crux of socialist construction was organization, and seventeen months later, in March 1919, at the time of the Eighth Congress of the Party, when the Soviet power was securely on its feet, the problems of organization loomed large. All the questions which Ilyich dealt with at the Eighth Congress were closely linked with the problems of organization. He spoke about office staffs, about bureaucracy and culture, about how the lack of culture stood in the way of socialist construction, prevented the broad masses from being drawn into socialist construction, hampered the fight against survivals of the past and interfered with the rooting up of bureaucracy; he spoke about the village, about strengthening the influence of the proletariat not only upon the rural workers and the poor, but upon the broadest sections of the peasantry, the middle peasants, who lived by their own labour without exploiting hired labour; he said that they had to be made the mainstay of the Soviet power, that they had to be catered to in the matter of supply; he spoke about the cooperative movement, and said that communism should be built out of what capitalism had left us as a legacy, that communism could not be built up with the hands of the Communists alone, that the old specialists, science, the whole experience of bourgeois construction had to be made use of for our own purposes.
The important thing in all this work was for people to know not only what link had to be grasped in order to pull out the whole chain, but how that link had to be grasped, how the chain was to be pulled out.
Two days before the congress Yakov Sverdlov, the Chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, died. In his speech at Sverdlov's funeral, Ilyich spoke about his ability to link theory with practice, about his moral prestige and organizing talent, laying special stress on the value of his work as an organizer of the broad proletarian masses:
"...This professional revolutionary never for a moment lost touch with the masses. Although the conditions of tsarism necessitated his working chiefly underground, illegally, as did most of the revolutionaries at that time, Comrade Sverdlov managed even then, in his underground and illegal activity, to march shoulder to shoulder and hand in hand with the advanced workers, who already from the beginning of the twentieth century began to take the place of the previous generation of revolutionaries from amongst the intelligentsia.
"It was at that time that the advanced workers came into the job by the dozen and the hundred and cultivated in themselves that hard tempering in the revolutionary struggle combined with the closest contact with the masses without which the revolution of the proletariat in Russia could not have succeeded." (Works, Vol. 29, p. 72.)
At the Eighth Congress of the Party Sverdlov was to have made a report on the organizational work of the Central Committee. This report was made instead by Lenin.
Speaking of Sverdlov, Ilyich said:
"Possessing as he did a vast, an incredibly vast memory, he kept in it the greater part of his report, and his personal acquaintance with the work of organization locally (my italics—N.K.) would have enabled him to make this report. I am unable to replace him even in one-hundredth degree ... dozens of delegates were received by Comrade Sverdlov daily and more than half of them were probably not Soviet officials but Party workers." (Ibid., p. 140.)
Ilyich spoke about Sverdlov having been an excellent judge of people with a remarkable flair for practical matters:
"It is to the remarkable organizing talent of this man that we owe what we have so far taken such legitimate pride in. It is to him we owe the possibility of efficient, expedient and really organized teamwork, the kind of work that would be worthy of the organized proletarian masses and meet the needs of the proletarian revolution—that organized teamwork without which we could not have scored a single success, without which we would not have overcome a single one of those innumerable difficulties, a single one of those painful trials through which we have already passed and are now obliged to pass.
"...We are profoundly convinced that the proletarian revolution in Russia and throughout the world will bring to the fore groups and groups of people, numerous layers of the proletarians and the toiling peasantry, who will provide that practical experience, that collective, if not individual, organizing talent (my italics—N.K.) without which the many-millioned armies of proletarians would not be able to achieve victory." (Ibid., pp. 73, 75.)
In recent years, especially in 1935-1936, we are witnessing a remarkable and rapid growth in the organizing talent of the masses. The conferences of Stakhanovites, combine operators, tractor drivers, Soviet land workers, and workers of the Soviet republics afford us an example of this collective organizing genius which has been developed during the period of Soviet Government.
We are not mere units, we are thousands....
None but a blind man could fail to grasp what .a tremendous power the collective organizing genius of the proletarian masses represents.
The mentality of the petty proprietor was a special obstacle to the organization of administrative and army work during the early years of the Soviet Government's existence.
At the First All-Russian Congress on Extra-School Education in May 1919 Ilyich spoke at some length on the question of this petty-proprietor anarchic mentality, which hampered the proper organization of work.
"The broad masses of the petty-bourgeois working population, while striving towards knowledge and smashing up the old, could introduce nothing of organized or organizing value." (My italics—N.K.)
