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Krupskaya's “Reminiscences of Lenin” |
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Page 27 of 27
The most important task of all that was being handled, Ilyich said, was that of making leaders of the proletariat. They were being made at the front, in all fields of administrative activity. Ilyich stressed the role of the subbotniks, the importance of enrolling workers into the Party. In Moscow alone as many as over fourteen thousand new members of the Party were enrolled during Party Week. Ilyich spoke about the reserves we had in the person of the worker and peasant youth, who had been reared under the conditions of active struggle. But the main thing to which attention had to be paid, Ilyich said, was the building up of proper relations with the peasant millions, the necessity of conducting a wide explanatory campaign among the peasantry. He spoke about how the civil war was opening the eyes of the peasantry to the true state of affairs. Ilyich spoke calmly. The general mood was one of elation.
Mayakovsky, who was then popular with the political-education workers, expressed this mood in his poem dedicated to the second anniversary of the October Revolution:
Let it be by a drop,
by two,
merge your spirits in world-wide fusion
to boost
by everything each can do
the workers' exploit
called
Revolution!
Congratulators
don't knock at the door?
shrivelling up
with fear?
What the hell do we need them for?
What's ten?
We'll come
to our hundredth year.
When we celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the October Revolution, and summed up the achievements on the front of socialist construction as recorded in the new Constitution of the Soviet Union, we all thought of Ilyich, of Ilyich's words and directives.
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